Aging & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A gorgeous line with a poisoned center: Fitzgerald makes youth sound less like a stage of life than the only currency that reliably spends. The opening shrug, "After all", performs a kind of exhausted sophistication, as if the speaker has already audited existence and found the balance sheet thin. What follows is a two-step retreat from hope: first, life offers "except youth"; then even that dwindles into secondhand pleasure, "the love of youth in others". You can feel the era in it - the Jazz Age obsession with vitality, beauty, speed - and the hangover baked into the syntax.

The subtext is not just vanity; it's power. Youth here isn't innocence, it's access: to attention, to desire, to the myth that reinvention is always around the corner. When Fitzgerald suggests older people survive by admiring youth in others, he's pointing at a social arrangement that keeps the young on display and the aging in the audience. It's tender if you read it as mentorship or admiration. It's darker if you hear consumption: youth as spectacle, as proof of life still happening somewhere nearby.

Fitzgerald's particular genius is how he turns romantic longing into an economic reality. Youth becomes scarce, then hoarded, then outsourced. The line works because it's both confession and indictment: he knows the trap is shallow, and he can't resist describing it in language so elegant it briefly makes the trap look like a gift.