F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. Tender Is the Night

2. Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.You always look so cool," she repeated.She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. The Great Gatsby

3. Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain. This Side of Paradise

4. Every one 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 Great Gatsby

5. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret. The Beautiful and Damned

6. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden. The Great Gatsby

7. I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night. Tender Is the Night

8. 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.

9. I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational. Gatsby Girls

10. I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition. The Beautiful and Damned

11. I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth... The Beautiful and Damned

12. I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. The Great Gatsby

13. I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

14. I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. The Great Gatsby

15. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The Great Gatsby

16. 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 romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't. This Side of Paradise

17. 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 romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they won't. This Side of Paradise

18. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library. The Great Gatsby

19. 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.

20. It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people. Gatsby Girls

21. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself. Tender is the Night

22. She was a thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips were the only point of contact with reality. Tender is the Night

23. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness. All the Sad Young Men

24. The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

25. They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered. This Side of Paradise

26. They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine. Tender Is the Night

27. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? This Side of Paradise

28. You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility. This Side of Paradise

29. You've got an awfully kissable mouth. Gatsby Girls

30. Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself - art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights...There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky."I know myself," he cried, "but that is all. This Side of Paradise