Zelda Fitzgerald Quotations

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

Mr. Fitzgerald, I believe that is how he spells his name, seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

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

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

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.

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

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.

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

Oh, the secret life of man and woman --dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

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

Nobody has ever been able to experience what they have thoroughly understood - or understand what they have experienced until they have achieved a detachment that renders them incapable of repeating the experience.

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

One illusion is as good as another.

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

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

There's nothing on earth to do here but look at the view and eat. You can imagine the result since I do not like to look at views.

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

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.

Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone.

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

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.

I suppose all we can really share with people is a taste for the same kinds of weather.

I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.

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.

And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be alright that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way you cannot quite remember – that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.

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

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.

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

They hadn't much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.

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.

Everybody gives you belief for the asking,' she said to David, 'and so few people give you anything more to believe in than your own belief - just not letting you down, that's all. Its so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.' 'So easy to be loved - so hard to love.' David answered

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

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.

She felt the essence of herself pulled finer and smaller like those streams of spun glass that pull and stretch till there remains but a glimmering illusion. Neither falling nor breaking, the stream spins finer. She felt herself very small and ecstatic. Alabama was in love.

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

Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow--or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends.

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

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

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.

We get something to do and as soon as we've got it, it gets us.

Millie Beggs, by the time she was forty-five, had become an emotional anarchist.

I take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun.

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

Anything incomprehensible has a sexual significance to many people under thirty-five.

Mr. Fitzgerald-I believe that is how he spells his name-seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising.

Spinach and champagne. Going back to the kitchens at the old Waldorf. Dancing on the kitchen tables, wearing the chef's headgear. Finally, a crash and being escorted out by the house detectives.

Nothing could have survived our life.

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.

Love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth.

The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.

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

Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

without you, dearest dearest I couldn't see or hear or feel or think - or live - I love you so and I'm never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night.

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.

A vacuum can only exist, I imagine, by the things which enclose it.

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.

Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

People are like almanacs, Bonnie - you never can find the information you're looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.

Death is the only real elegance.

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.

isn't it funny how danger makes people passionate?

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?

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

Father said conflict develops the character

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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