F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

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

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour.

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

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

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

I’m thirty. I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.

They’ll keep out of my way. It takes two to make an accident.

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 was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited—they went there.

I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.