F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Trapped. Sinking. Can't be myself. Made into what other people expect. Is that everyone's fate? Were the great individualists the products of their friends who wanted a great individualist as a friend?

People like to make children into little grown-ups.

The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped.

We have a generation of people who think they can stand before the judgment seat of God despite their sins.

I think the world tries to put people in a box, like this is the only appropriate way to be beautiful.

How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.

Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

You don't make peace only with G-d. You make it with people. Sin isn't global. It's personal. If you do wrong to someone, the only way to fix that is to go to that same person and do right by him.

People should meet an acceptable threshold of appropriateness. But for many women in the public eye, it just seems that the burden is so heavy.

Shame makes people abandon their children and drink themselves to death. It also keeps us from true happiness. An apology is a glorious release.

Why do people care what I'm wearing or what I'm eating, and why are people looking down on me because I'm not wearing high heels? That's the downside to being in the public eye.

But people didn't forgive you for doing what felt right-that was the last thing they forgave you for.

Some people take the spelling bee very seriously. These people are called "parents of children in the spelling bee." They're trying to make up for their own childhood of crushed dreams and misspelled words.

People will disapprove of you if you're unhappy, or if you're happy in The Wrong Way.

As soon as a woman is old enough to have an opinion and have a voice and be unafraid, she's very much encouraged by all sorts of people to crawl under a rock and die. And it's so weird. My crime is not dying.

Making matters worse is people's natural inclination to be easy on themselves, judging themselves according to their good intentions-while holding others to a higher standard and judging them by their worst actions.

People are really concerned about my relationship status. When I tell people I'm happy being single, they don't believe me. They say: 'You have to be miserable being alone'.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.

I believe so many people live what I call that false identity they are living according to other people's expectations, associations, their experiences, the labels in life. And they buy into that.

We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, some of us are tossed helpless . . . ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants -- PUBLIC OPINION.

You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.