Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure she was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart.

She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.

Look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.

I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.

I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.

I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.

isn't it funny how danger makes people passionate?

By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future.

Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.

Experience teaches you how to do things you never want to do again.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.

I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination.

Life has puffed and blown itself into a summer day, and clouds and spring billow over the heavens as if calendars were a listing of mathematical errors.

I'm just not the same. Half of me is out there looking for you and the other half is wishing i didn't have to." I don't want to live - I want to love first, And live incidentally. Don't-don't ever think of the things you can't give me-You've trusted me with the dearest heart of all-and it's so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had.

It's terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.

Other people's ideas of us are dependent largely on what they've hoped for.

All I want to be is very young always and very irresponsible and to feel that my life is my own-to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself

The purpose of life on earth is that the soul should grow - So Growl By doing what is right.

Don't you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered - and I was delivered to you - to be worn. I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a buttonhole bouquet.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.

I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.

Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?

The trouble with emergencies is," she said, "that I always put on my finest underwear and then nothing happens.

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

I play the radio and moon about...and dream of Utopias where its always July the 24th 1935, in the middle of summer forever.

Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world.

Pronunciation has made many an innocent word sound like a doctor's orders for a stomach pump.

We walked at night towards a cafe blooming with Japanese lanterns and I followed your white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. Rising off the water, lights flickered an invitation far enough away to be interpreted as we liked; to shimmer glamourously behind the silhouette of retrospective good times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs.

Oh, we are going to be so happy away from all the things that almost got us but couldn't quite because we were too smart for them!

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.

Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure ... another chance in life.

I can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.

The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.

Youth doesn't need friends -- it only needs crowds.

Women sometimes seem to share a quiet, unalterable dogma of persecution that endows even the most sophisticated of them with the inarticulate poignancy of the peasant.

memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for

Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. i just lump everything in a great heap which i have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, i am ready to continue.

Death is the only real elegance.

Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.

And only weaklings...who lack courage and the power to feel they're right when the whole world says they're wrong, ever lose.

Father said conflict develops the character

Scott-there's nothing in the world I want but you-and your precious love. All the material things are nothing. I'd just hate to live in a sordid, colorless existence-because you'd soon love less-and less-and I'd do anything-anything-to keep your heart for my own-I don't want to live-I want to love first and live incidentally.

It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her - that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self - that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.

I believed I was a salamander, and it seems I am nothing but an impediment.

["The Sun Also Rises" is about] bullfighting, bullslinging and bullsh[*]t.