A Novel Of Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.

Won’t we be quite the pair?—you with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile.

Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say?

There's nothing like losing yourself in someone else's troubles to make you forget your own.

Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or just characters in one of my novels.

Adventure:' there's a word that worked on us both like a charm.

He smiled then, and I felt that smile like a vibration moving through me, the way you might feel if you walked through a ghost or it walked through you.

There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds--and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.

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.

I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.

No writer should be the same as another, that’s not art.

... 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.

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

This is what we've got at the moment, who we are. It's not nearly what we once had- the good, I mean- but it's also not what we once had, meaning the bad.

In my experience, there were two kinds of men. One type—no matter how plain or how poor he might be—is always willing to at least try his luck with an attractive girl. The other type looks upon all of those first types with envy.

Women are formed for love, yes, but also for purpose, and the highest state for a woman—for all humans, in fact—comes when one discovers and then achieves one’s ultimate purpose.

We glared at each other then, with the kind of hatred that comes from being deliberately wounded in one’s softest, most vulnerable places by a person who used to love you passionately.

There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us?

His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek's rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.

I’m Alabama-born, so a transplant here—but I think I could enjoy growing some roots.

It’s a grown-ups’ playground, isn’t it?

But Zelda, what wouldn't you give to go back to the beginning, to be those people again, the future so fresh and promising that it seems impossible not to get it right?

Are we rich?" "We're unstoppable.

Single women could work all they wanted; married women locked themselves into a gilded cage. All of that had seemed natural before. Now, it made me angry. Now, I saw how a woman might sometimes want to steer her own course rather than trail her husband like a favored dog.

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for New York City.

No longer did I imagine that any place we lived would become permanent. The only question was how long we'd stay.

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.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

...-no, I was a strange new Zelda Sayre released from all constrictions, drunk with the timeless rhythms of sea and sun and passion, more daring and oblivious to danger than I'd ever been before.

Consider: The mouth is the only bit of erotic landscape visible when a woman is dressed. It is the symbol of every moist cavern a woman possesses, which all men are bound to seek out, we have no choice.

Maybe I ought to have put her together with Coco, who might have enlightened us both about the impracticality and undesirability of giving one’s whole self to any man—for all the good it would have done.

Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today.

Critics were rigid and hidebound, never willing to give due credit for anything that didn’t fit in with their predetermined parameters of what fiction ought to be.

Exhaustion's not an excuse, its a reason

I don’t want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally. —Zelda Fitzgerald

A man deserves credit when he accomplishes something of importance. Something that provides for the betterment of his life and his family's life and, whenever possible, mankind.

You—and I’ll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays—fancies himself a poet, when all you’re doing is building little towers of words set prettily on a page.

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.

I could focus again on why we'd all come here in the first place. I could focus on Scott. How handsome and distinguished he looked in his dark gray suit, a finer cut than I'd seen him in before. He looked like the man he said he was going to be, and I thought, I will never doubt him again.

When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

Daha yakından baktığınızda olağanüstü, büyüleyici bir şey göreceksiniz, sahici ve doğru bir şey. Biz asla göründüğümüz gibi olmadık.

What men need is to grow up.

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe.

what wouldn’t you give to go back to the beginning, to be those people again, the future so fresh and promising that it seems impossible not to get it right?

Trouble, it don’t need an engraved invitation.

It was easy enough to tell: if I wasn't writing, I didn't exist.

The spoken word is fleeting. That’s why novelists are so essential: we record everything we see, we dissect and analyze and reproduce the essence of what matters, for posterity.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from. —George Eliot

He drinks too much, it’s true, and he has not always been good to me or to himself, but I think he’s broken somewhere inside, and he drinks to try to fill the cracks.

What story will our kids be telling about us someday, do you suppose?” “It’ll be a lot more romantic than two senators matchmaking,” I said. “They’ll say that we were meant to be together no matter what. For us, stars aligned, the gods smiled—prob’ly there was a tidal wave someplace, too, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.” “A Homeric epic, it sounds like. Have another glass of champagne and tell me more.” *

I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like Shakespeare?" I sat up and took Tootsie's hands. "You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?" The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap. "Yes," Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. "Yes, it is exactly like that.

Every sort of trouble I can think of, we've tried it out- become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I've come to wonder whether artists in particularity seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

We can have romance, love, sex, respect, self-respect, and fulfilling employment in whatever interests us, if we like. Motherhood doesn’t need to be our whole lives—it can be one feature in a woman’s broader life, the same as fatherhood is for men.

I'd already sensed the attraction between us. it was apparent from the first time we met. But that sort of attraction was so usual that it didn't rate serious attention, let alone concern. When the attraction turned into something that smelled and tasted like substance, though, that was when things got complicated. A married woman will first deny to herself that anything improper is going on. She'll make excuses for her eagerness to see the man in question. She likes his sharp mind, for example, or his fresh views, or the stories he tells about his experiences, which are so different from her own. She'll dismiss as mere amusement her mind's tendency to wonder where he is and what he's doing, and whether he's thinking of her. She might even avoid the fellow for a day or two to test herself. If she doesn't see him and she feels fine about that, she'll know there's no cause for concern. The test is fake, though, too, because she's lying to herself to make sure she passes the test, which will then justify her choice to see him again, often.

Even there in the midst of my belief that there was nothing worth salvaging, I could feel the truth of his words. Our circus act, begun at the Biltmore Hotel four years earlier, had mostly been a success. To admit as much, though, would be to undermine my argument. He would take the admission and twist it around in some way that would make him the victim and me the villain. I couldn't say what I knew: that I was the villain, too.

Scott stared at her mouth, just stared like he was hypnotized, paralyzed, like that crimson O was the answer to all of life’s problems, or maybe just his prayers. I kicked his shin to break the spell, which worked; he blinked, then ate the bite himself as if he’d never even offered it to anyone at all. I looked frankly at Carmel; her expression was innocently amused. There are women whose whole selves are engaged in being a public commodity, and Carmel was one of these. Every gesture she made, every syllable she uttered, the tinkle of her laughter, the way her dress’s fabric draped over her breasts, all of it was self-conscious and deliberate, designed to elicit admiration in women, desire in men. This isn’t to say I held any of that against her. Not a bit. I liked her, in fact. The way I saw it, she was a kind of living work of art, and funny and thoughtful besides. Was it her fault if she, as had happened to me, sometimes provoked the basest feelings in a man? Scott and Fred made short work of that second bottle of brandy while Carmel’s and my glasses still held our initial pour. I’d found that drinking very much of any kind of alcohol still did bad things to my stomach. Carmel might have found that it did bad things to her self-preservation; I know that if I looked like her, I’d never let down my guard.

In the deep, wet tangled, wild jungle where even natives won't go is a mystical, dangerous river. The river's got no name because naming it would make it real, and no one wanted to believe that river be real. They say you get there only inside a dream-but don't you think of it at bedtime, now, 'cause not everyone who goes there be able to leave! That jungle canopy, it so leafy true daylight can never break in the riverbank, it be wet muck thick with creatures that eat you alive if you stay still too long. To miss that fate, you gots to go into the black water. But the water be heavy as hot tar; once you in, it bind you and pull you along, bit by bit, 'til you come to the end of the land, and then over the water goes in a dark, slow cascade, the highest falls in the history of the world ever. There be demons in that cascading water, and snakes, and wraiths that whisper in your ears. They love you, they say. You should give yourself to them, stay with them, become one of them, they say. 'Isn't it good here?' they say. 'No pain, no trouble.' But also no light and no love and no joy and no ground. You tumble and tumble as you fall, and you try and choose, but your mind be topsy-turvy and maybe you can't think so well, and maybe you can't choose right, and maybe you never wake up. "It felt like that," I tell Tootsie, "even after you got me out and Scott moved me to Highland. I couldn't choose. I couldn't shut out the wraiths...But you would say, 'Hang on, sweetie,' and Scottie would say, 'I miss you, Mama,' and Scott would hold me, just hold me and say nothing at all." Tootsie snorts. "Scott was useless the whole while." "Scott was in the river, too.

Bana bu işi nasıl yaptığını, bütün bir romanı nasıl yazdığını daha fazla anlatsın, neleri okumaktan hoşlandığını anlatsın ve ben de ona neleri okumayı sevdiğimi anlatayım istiyordum, ki sonra da o kitaplardan konuşabilelim.

Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds—and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.

Mama was pretty lively before her daddy put a leash on her.

maybe I would be happier if I accepted the traditional thinking, rejected this particular aspect of the modern woman’s approach to marriage. It was so much easier to be led, to be pampered and powdered and petted for being an agreeable wife. Easier, I thought, but boring.

Here’s what I figured: Édouard was less a man than a symbol for me, a symbol of my yearning for something I couldn’t yet name. If I’d heard of Amelia Earhart at the time, I might have been as willing to follow her lead as I was Édouard’s. I wasn’t in love with him, not really. Édouard was a symbol. Édouard was a symptom. Scott, for all his shortcomings, owned my heart.

I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, Look closer... and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true.

Here’s what I figured: Edouard was less a man than a symbol for me, a symbol of my yearning for something I couldn’t yet name. If I’d heard of Amelia Earhart at the time, I might have been as willing to follow her lead as I was Edouard’s.

To be a writer then was to be a drab little mole who thought big thoughts and methodically committed them to paper, hoping for publication but not courting it, and then burrowing back into the hole to think again for a while. With this group, though, and their counterparts from Yale, and the postwar push for life, for fun, for all the things Scott and I were seeking and embodying, the literary world put its foot into the circle of the entertainment world’s spotlight. Not far; far enough, though, for the public to see the polished, well-cut shoe and wonder to whom it might belong.

The human being is complex and I find the vile acts, contradictions and sublimities characteristic of our condition astonishing. Our existence would be an exasperating shade of grey if we were all flawless.

Warm words, though, are no panacea. Our ruts were now so deeply cut into the landscape, and we were so tired and worn, that neither Scott nor I could steer ourselves anyplace new.

It was so much easier to be led, to be pampered and powdered and petted for being an agreeable wife. Easier, I thought, but boring. And not only boring, but plain wrong. Who really believed that men could be trusted to always get things right?

With all my new education, my ideals had grown far loftier than my talent could accommodate.

Trouble has lots of forms. There’s financial trouble and marital trouble, there’s trouble with friends, and trouble with landlords and trouble with liquor and trouble with the law. Every sort of trouble I can think of, we’ve tried it out – become expert at some of it, even, so much so that I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.

I wanted him to tell me more about how he’d done it, written a whole entire novel, and about what he liked to read, and I wanted to tell him what I liked to read, and then we could talk about things from those books.

His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek’s rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.

Sono un romanziere. Vivo per definizione in un mondo d'invenzione.

Ora finalmente la giostra si era fermata. Ci ero salita di mia spontanea volontà, non dico il contrario, ma questo non significava che non avessi bisogno e voglia di scendere.

Era molto più facile lasciarsi guidare, viziare e coccolare da brava moglie accondiscendente. Più facile, pensai, ma noioso. E non solo, anche decisamente sbagliato. Chi poteva credere davvero che gli uomini scegliessero sempre per il meglio? […] Le donne nubili potevano lavorare, mentre quelle sposate si rinchiudevano in una gabbia dorata. Questo un tempo mi appariva naturale. Ora mi faceva infuriare perché capivo che una donna poteva voler seguire la propria strada, invece di andare dietro al marito come un cagnolino.

For us, stars aligned, the gods smiled—prob’ly there was a tidal wave someplace, too, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.