F. Scott Fitzgerald — Quotes from Author's Books

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 of 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.

Of course I’ve got one, a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was "You can't live forever; you can't live forever".

Self-indulgence is back of evil.

When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

That love was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling dream.

Human sympathy has its limits.

His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps, and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home, three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption—and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them good-by.

Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity—we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

... splendor is something in the heart.