Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one's destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few.

I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—

The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

Her voice is full of money,... That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money- that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it....High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl....

The tears coursed down her cheeks - not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into a deep vinous sleep.

There's a loneliness that only exists in one's mind. 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.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these 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.

The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.

It is youth's felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future - flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.