Zelda Fitzgerald Love Quotes

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

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

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.

Excuse me for being so intellectual. I know you would prefer something nice and feminine and affectionate.

Thanks again for saving me. Someday, I’ll save you too.

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

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.

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

Nothing could have survived our life.

I’m so damn glad I love you – I wouldn’t love any other man on earth – I b’lieve if I had deliberately decided on a sweetheart, he’d have been you.

I dont' want to live - I want to love first, and live incidentally.

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.

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.

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

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

Your photograph is all I have: it is with me from the morning when I wake up with a frantic half dream about you to the last moment when I think of you and of death at night.

All these soft, warm nights going to waste when I ought to be lying in your arms under the moon - the dearest arms in all the world - darling arms that I love to feel around me - How much longer - before they’ll be there to stay? When I do get home again, you’ll certainly have a most awful time ever moving me one inch from you.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

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.

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

There’s nothing in all the world I want but you and your precious love. All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence because you’d soon love me 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… 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.

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

She is the most charming person in the world. That’s all. I refuse to amplify. Excepting- she’s perfect.

Being in love, she concluded, is simply the presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought, another chance in life.

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.

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 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.

The Great Gatsby's my favorite book," he says. "F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated it to Zelda." "His wife?" I say. "Yeah. His crazy-ass wife who he had no business loving that much," he says, giving me a loaded look. "You know what their joint epitaph says? It's a quote from the book... Their kid picked it for them." I shake my head. "What's it say?" His eyes close halfway as he recites, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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.

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.

. . . she tried to weave the strength of her father and the young beauty of her first love with David, the happy oblivion of her teens and her warm protected childhood into a magic cloak.

David, I’ll fly for you, if you’ll love me!” “Fly, then.” “I can’t fly, but love me anyway.” “Poor wingless child!” “Is it so hard to love me?” “Do you think you are easy, my illusive possession?

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

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

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

Since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with.

I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth and is about the equivalent of people who stimulate themselves with dirty post cards-

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Kiss me, lover. One darling kiss.

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.

Are we rich?" "We're unstoppable.

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.

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.

You and I have been happy; we haven’t been happy just once, we’ve been happy a thousand times. The chances that spring, that’s for everyone, like in the popular songs, may belong to us too – the chances are pretty bright at this time because as usual, I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand – and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and – I find it to be you and you only…. Forget the past – what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever – even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you – turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back…

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

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.

No personality as strong as Zelda’s could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I've always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has “kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,” cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.

I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.

Goodnight dear. If you were in my bed it might be the back of your head I was touching, where the hair is short, or it might be up in the front where it makes little caves above your head. But wherever it was, it would be the sweetest place, the sweetest place.

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.

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

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

But swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fracture it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward.-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to his wife Zelda.

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.

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 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.

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.” ZELDA FITZGERALD

But of course the real reason . . . is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. (Correspondence 53)

Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.

Everything pursues its own ends and skies stay warm + beneficent - though winter time always leaves many vagrant nostalgias and a sense of more supply than demand of Time and of the portentousness of the weather.

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.

Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.

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.

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.