F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are no second acts in American lives.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her voice is full of money.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I know myself, but that is all.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. "All right," I said, "I'm glad it's a girl. And 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

When a man is tired of life at 21 it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald