Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

Nothing could have survived our life. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Experience teaches you how to do things you never want to do again. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

I married the heroine of my stories. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

But it was not her beauty that was arresting. It was her style, a sort of insolence toward life, her total lack of caution, her fearless and abundant pride. ~ Nancy Milford

Remembrance. Even more, confession. It did always made the heavy things come loose. ~ Erika Robuck

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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! ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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
~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

He believed, as I did, that we are helpless to resist or influence what our hearts are bound to do. - Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald ~ Therese Anne Fowler

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia
a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

Isn't it funny how danger makes people passionate? ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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 ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Death is the only real elegance. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await. ~ Therese Anne Fowler

She did as she pleased, regarding life as 'an inexhaustible counter', from which she seemed to be continually picking out presents for herself. ~ Judith Mackrell

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward. ~ Therese Anne Fowler

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

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

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

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

While I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be. ~ Therese Anne Fowler

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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 ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty ~ Ring Lardner

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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". ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane ... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world
they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

One doctor in Chicago said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he had never seen one before. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

L have no recollection of just when, or more important, why l set about telling the story of the Siege. l suppose it was because l realized l had the right background - and because no one else, as far as I knew, had ever tried it. ~ Valerie Fitzgerald

The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Personality is a series of unbroken gestures. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Her hair, drawn back off her ears, brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Christ.
No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People
have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel's sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think:
Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches,
God of the Mystery. ~ Stephen King

...The man who stood before her was taller and stranger than anyone she had ever encountered. His unkempt hair was a long dark brown, partially braided and twisted around twigs, the tips of his pointed ears poking between strands. His bare chest made her flush, but it was completely covered in green inked tattoos. Leather breeches creaked when he shifted. He held his hand out to her, uncurling fingers with long nails. "Aislin," he repeated, his voice gruff and purring, "do not be frightened. I have been waiting so long for you. ~ Lori J. Fitzgerald

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction - Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I want to tell you about your heart - you've probably been neglecting your heart - and you don't know. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

This is not a time for hereos because nobody will let it happen ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Happiness is the relief after extreme tension ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

His hand took hold of hers, and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn't be over-dreamed - that voice was a deathless song. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

One spring patio is for rodeos
niggled with iodine figures, weaved
tapestries inside vast Tuileries.
But that reminds me, how exactly
do words form brittle histories ~ Adam Fitzgerald

But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up, and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I don't understand yet how it all happened.'

'Neither do I.' He smiled grimly. 'I guess these baby parties are pretty rough affairs. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You once liked me, didn't you?, he asked.
LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The music was great for teaching about human nature. but I couldn't do any instruments or play anything. I like to sing. I'd rather sing than eat, but most people would rather hear me eat. ~ Kevin Fitzgerald

I'm not a southern lady, I'm from Pennsylvania and we speak sort of correctly there. People identify me that way and they also easily identify me on the street because of my short stature. I get picked out in many ways and no way is a burden. ~ Zelda Rubinstein