Life's Pleasures Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s line works because it turns seduction into arithmetic: a clean little sequence that feels inevitable the moment you hear it. The first clause preserves the romance of choice. You take a drink. You are the agent, the consumer, the person with a good story and a steady hand. Then the syntax quietly slips the knife in: “the drink takes a drink.” The subject changes, and with it the moral terrain. Alcohol is no longer an object; it’s a character with appetite, duplicating itself through you. By the time we land on “then the drink takes you,” the grammar has completed the coup. Agency has been repossessed.

That’s the specific intent: not temperance-scolding, but diagnosis. Fitzgerald isn’t arguing that drinking is sinful; he’s arguing that it’s narratively treacherous. One act becomes a chain of acts, and the chain eventually tells the story instead of you. It’s a writer’s insight into addiction: the way habit edits your life until the plot belongs to something else.

The subtext is Fitzgerald’s own era of champagne bravado and hangover dread. The Jazz Age sold intoxication as glamour, rebellion, and modernity; Fitzgerald helped craft that mythology even as it chewed through him. The line feels like a wink at party culture that curdles into fatalism. It’s cynical, yes, but also intimate: the kind of aphorism you say when you’ve watched pleasure turn managerial, then predatory, then total.