Wit & Attitude Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius, Fitzgerald suggests, doesn’t start out arrogant; it starts out embarrassed. The “large feet” image is comic on purpose: something blunt, obvious, hard to hide, and socially inconvenient. Early talent can feel like that in a room full of polite mediocrity. You’re too loud, too fast, too intense; you trip the furniture everyone else has agreed not to move. So youth becomes a long apprenticeship in self-editing, preemptive apologizing, and trying to shrink yourself to fit other people’s comfort.

The sting is in the second sentence, where Fitzgerald turns the fable into an indictment. If you spend your formative years treating your gifts as a social offense, you eventually stop negotiating. Those same feet that once apologized start “raising” themselves: kicking, stepping over, leaving. The aggression isn’t presented as a moral failing so much as a predictable recoil. “Fools and bores” aren’t merely stupid or dull; they’re the guardians of atmospheres where brilliance is expected to be grateful, charming, and quiet. They punish difference by making it feel rude.

It’s also a self-portrait in disguise. Fitzgerald lived inside a culture that fetishized ease, manners, and likability, even as it devoured the people who couldn’t keep performing them. The line carries his era’s salon cruelty and his own fatigue: the cost of constantly translating yourself for an audience that wants your sparkle, not your scale. In that light, the later-life swiftness isn’t cruelty; it’s escape velocity.