F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’

— Spoken by a character · I

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

— Spoken by a character · VIII

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

— Spoken by a character · IV

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can't get rid of habits.

— Horace · Head and Shoulders

I'm not sure what I'll do, but--well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.

— Spoken by a character · The Ice Palace

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase--'I love you.'

— Spoken by a character · The Offshore Pirate

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion.

— John

ANOTHER CHILD: I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future--flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.