Life & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald nails the particular cruelty of family conflict: it doesn’t just hurt, it deforms. The first move is almost legalistic - “they don’t go according to any rules” - stripping away the comforting fiction that intimacy makes us more civilized. In family, the usual social contracts don’t apply; you can’t bargain with a sibling the way you bargain with a stranger because the argument is rigged with history. Everyone arrives carrying receipts, roles, and childhood versions of each other that refuse to die.

The comparison to “aches or wounds” is doing surgical work. Aches imply time and patience; wounds imply treatment, a clean narrative of injury and recovery. Fitzgerald rejects both metaphors because family damage rarely stays in its lane. It’s not pain you manage, it’s a rupture in the shared story about who you are to one another.

Then comes the devastating image: “splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.” That’s not melodrama; it’s a theory of emotional scarcity. Healing requires slack - extra trust, extra generosity, extra capacity to rewrite the past. Some families don’t have that surplus. They’re stretched thin by money, pride, addiction, class anxiety, or simply the relentless pressure to keep performing “family” while resenting the cost.

In Fitzgerald’s world - and in his own biography of status hunger and romantic implosion - love isn’t the antidote to conflict. It’s the accelerant. The closer the bond, the less room there is to retreat, and the more catastrophic every tear becomes.