Author Quotes
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— The Great Gatsby (1925)
The novel's final line — one of the most famous in American literature. The metaphor of rowing against the current captures the impossibility of escaping history and memory.
“I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
— The Great Gatsby (1925)
Daisy on her newborn daughter. Not cynicism but exhausted realism — Fitzgerald gives Daisy a moment of devastating self-awareness about what the world does to women who see too clearly.
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."”
— The Great Gatsby (1925)
The novel's opening passage. Nick Carraway establishes the moral framework of the book — empathy through awareness of privilege.
“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.”
— The Crack-Up (1936)
From Fitzgerald's confessional essay series in Esquire. Written during his breakdown, it's a definition of maturity that doubles as a description of artistic vision.