Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Something may be a sort of fulfillment of yourself, and it may not be great to other people, but it is just as essential to yourself as if it is a great masterpiece.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Death is the only real elegance.

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.

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.

Nothing could have survived our life.

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

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.

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama's continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality.

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

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.

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.

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

Paris is a pen-and-ink drawing before nine o'clock.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.

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.

I've tried so many times to think of a new way to say it - and it's still I love you - love you - love you - my Sweetheart.

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

It's very expressive of myself. I just lump everything into a great heap which I have labelled "the past" and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.'
They sat together in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.

You'll be sorry," he said unpleasantly.
"I hope so," Alabama answered. "I like paying for the things I do-it makes me feel square with the world".

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

We will have each other and we can be safe and warm.

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

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

Discs of umbrellas poured over suburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes.

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.

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

It is very melancholy without you. I love you more all the time and since I did not think there was any more it's an overwhelming and frightening state to be in.

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!

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

Darling
I love these velvet nights. I've never been able to decide whether the night was a bitter enemie or a "grand patron"
or whether I love you most in the eternal classic half-lights where it blends with day or in the full religious fan-fare of mid-night or perhaps in the lux of noon. Anyway, I love you most and you 'phoned me just because you phoned me tonight
I walked on those telephone wires for two hours after holding your love like a parasol to balance me. My dear

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

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

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

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.

It was good to be a stranger in a land when you felt aggressive and acquisitive, but when you began to weave your horizons into some kind of shelter it was good to know that hands you loved had helped in their spinning - made you feel as if the threads would hold together better.

She wished she could help David to seem more legitimate. She wished she could do something to keep everything from being so undignified. Life seemed so uselessly extravagant.

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.

Those men think I'm purely decorative, and they're fools for not knowing better.

I do not want to live.
I want to love and then to live,
incidentally.

My dear, I think of you always and at night I build myself a warm nest of things I remember and float in your sweetness till morning.

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

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.

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

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.