All Time Famous F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Born in Minnesota, Fitzgerald grew up in New York and attended Princeton. A failed romance pushed him to drop out and join the army during WWI. Stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda, a captivating Southern socialite. They married after his first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” achieved major success and established him as a literary star. After his debut novel skyrocketed him to fame, Fitzgerald’s career became a rollercoaster. His second success propelled him into the high life, fueling his need for money through magazine stories. While hobnobbing with European artists, he penned “The Great Gatsby,” a critical darling but commercial flop now considered a masterpiece. Battling his wife’s mental illness, he finished his final novel before fading from the limelight.

Fitzgerald’s career took a downturn as public taste shifted. Financial woes from dwindling book sales pushed him to Hollywood, where he unsuccessfully pursued screenwriting. Living with his final companion, he briefly overcame alcoholism. Sadly, after years of struggle, he passed away at 44 from a heart attack. He left behind an unfinished novel, later pieced together and published, adding to his legacy despite the bittersweet end.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

1. “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

2. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. “For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

5. “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

6. “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. “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

8. “To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

9. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

10. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

12. “I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

13. “I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

14. “Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

15. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

16. “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

17. “There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. “I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

19. “Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

20. “I never blame failure – there are too many complicated situations in life – but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

21. “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

22. “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

23. “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

24. “I’m a cynical idealist.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

25. “You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

26. “God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

27. “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. Start 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. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

29. “I hope you live a life you’re proud of.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

30. “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

31. “Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

32. “You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known – and even that is an understatement.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

33. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

34. “Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

35. “Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

36. “Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

37. “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

38. “Forgotten is forgiven.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

39. “He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

40. “You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

41. “Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

42. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

43. “Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

44. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

45. “Intelligence is measured by a person’s ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

46. “Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know – because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

47. “Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

48. “I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

49. “Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. – The Great Gatsby.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

50. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

51. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

52. “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?”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

53. “Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

56. “They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

57. “Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

58. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

59. “At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

60. “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others – young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

61. “They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

62. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

63. “I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

64. “So we’ll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

65. “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

66. “Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

67. “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

68. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

69. “The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

70. “So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight – watching over nothing.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

71. “When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this – so accidental – just when everything was going well.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

72. “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

73. “She was dazzling – alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

74. “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

75. “Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

76. “You know I’m old in some ways and others, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

77. “Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin – but they don’t, even you and I…”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

78. “People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

79. “Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

80. “It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

81. “Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

82. “I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

83. “Love is fragile – she was thinking – but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love words, the tenderness learned, and treasured up for the next lover.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

84. “He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

85. “He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

86. “It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

87. “People living alone get used to loneliness.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

88. “She was beautiful, but not like those girls in magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. She is beautiful.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

89. “I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

90. “You remind me of a smoked cigarette.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

91. “Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

92. “Nothing any good isn’t hard.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

93. “I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

94. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

95. “The compensation of very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense, one stays young.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

96. “What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

97. “She wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe forever.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

98. “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

99. “The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

100. “Once we were one person, and always it will be a little that way.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

101. “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

102. “It appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbors as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

103. “I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

104. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

105. “Well, I can’t describe her exactly- except to say that she was beautiful. She was tremendously alive.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

106. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties, there isn’t any privacy.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

107. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

108. “The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

109. “There was a kindliness about intoxication – there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

110. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

111. “The ability to hold two competing thoughts in one’s mind and still be able to function is the mark of a superior mind.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

112. “January, the Monday of months…”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

113. “It takes a genius to whine appealingly.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

114. “Character is plot, plot is character.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

115. “It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

116. “Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

117. “Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

118. “Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

119. “I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

120. “Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

121. “You really ought to read more books – you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

122. “The rich get richer and the poor get – children.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

123. “Egyptian Proverb: The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, To want for one who comes not, To try to please and please not.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

124. “We all have souls of different ages.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

125. “He knew that when he kissed this girl and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

126. “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

127. “I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

128. “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

129. “Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds, they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

130. “The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

131. “All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

132. “There are no second acts in American lives.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

133. “No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

134. “Happiness is the relief after extreme tension.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

135. “I used to build dreams about you.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

136. “Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

137. “And then, one fairy night, May became June.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

138. “Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

139. “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

140. “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

141. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

142. “A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

143. “It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

144. “If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

145. “Before you criticize others, remember, they may not have had the same opportunities in life as you have had.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

146. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

147. “I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

148. “I can’t tell you just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want anyone to know.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

149. “It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties, we know they won’t save us any more than love did.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

150. “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

151. “I found something! Courage – just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

152. “Breathing dreams like air.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

153. “I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

154. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

155. “Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

156. “This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do – and wouldn’t last.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

157. “New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

158. “Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

159. “The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer-the charm of women and the courage of men.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

160. “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.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

161. “Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

162. “We must leave this terrifying place tomorrow and go searching for sunshine.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

163. “The rich are different from us.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

164. “Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog, his affection emerged – the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

165. “I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

166. “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

167. “An unread book is just a block of paper.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

168. “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

169. “I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

170. “All I think of ever is that I love you.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

171. “It’s a mining town in lotus land.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

172. “This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

173. “A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

174. “It takes two to make an accident.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

175. “Never confuse activity with action.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

176. “Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

177. “Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

178. “You can’t repeat the past.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

179. “Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

180. “There’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you’ve made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don’t suppose I can stop you, but I really don’t think it’s very considerate.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

181. “An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

182. “I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

183. “Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

184. “Beautiful things only grow to a certain height, and then they fail and fade off.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

185. “I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

186. “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

187. “Find the key emotion; this may be all you need to know to find your short story.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

188. “Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

189. “I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

190. “The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at some time, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

191. “It’s Never too late, or in my case too early, to be whoever you want to be.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

192. “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

193. “Baseball is a game played by idiots for morons.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

194. “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

195. “Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream’s shadow.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

196. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

197. “Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

198. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

199. “I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

200. “Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald