Life & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Switzerland, in Fitzgerald's hands, isn’t a postcard; it’s a pressure valve. "Very few things begin" casts the country as deliberately inert, a place engineered for stability so thorough it borders on sterility. Then comes the kicker: "but many things end". The line weaponizes Swiss neutrality and alpine serenity into something faintly sinister - a soft landing for hard failures. It’s the geography of aftermath.

Fitzgerald knew how to write about glamour as a kind of anesthetic, and here Switzerland becomes the ultimate sedative: clean, orderly, expensive, removed from consequence. The subtext is that societies built to avoid mess also become ideal places to dispose of it. You don’t go to Switzerland to make a life; you go there to tidy up the wreckage - an affair cooling into resignation, a fortune laundered into respectability, a scandal smothered by discretion. The country functions as narrative punctuation: a period, not a first sentence.

Context matters: interwar Europe, where borders were volatile and reputations were portable. Switzerland was already coded in the cultural imagination as refuge and safe deposit box - for money, for bodies, for secrets. Fitzgerald, who chronicled Americans abroad chasing refinement and escape, turns that coding into a moral observation. A nation celebrated for peace becomes, in one crisp reversal, a place where endings can be outsourced: neat, quiet, and paid for.