Digital Commonplace Book

(A collection of quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Scroll down for additional authors.)

​

"And now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He reads deep books with long words in them.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

​

"I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if by ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city out line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repealed by the inexhaustible variety of life.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

​

“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. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irritable prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believe 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

​

"So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

​

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

​

“Angry, half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

​

“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. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifter fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald