LLR Books

The quotable Fitzgerald


“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”  This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood — she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, in This Side of Paradise

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

 “There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully - assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in the light of the moon.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “…it was only the past that ever seemed strange and unbelievable.”          F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Beautiful and the Damned

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you have a life you’re proud of. If you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 

 “She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Elysees, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter - like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination, Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.”  Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned.

 “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I’m not sentimental—I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t”  F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

 “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.” Dick Diver, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night

 “You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

 “…and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking — and this was flattering attention, for who looks at us? — glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

“I hope she’ll be a fool - that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”           F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “Don’t let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

 “She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”  Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” —    F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow fast in movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “If we could only learn to look evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.”  This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” —   F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

 “The world exists in your eyes only. You can make it as big or as small as you want.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.” F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Beautiful and Damned.

 “It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self -respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.” Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “There’s so much spring in the air - there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.” This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.”  The Great Gatsby

 “It’s just that I feel so sad these wondrous nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

 “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”  F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” F. Scott Fitzgerald.