Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Nothing could have survived our life.

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.

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

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.

Death is the only real elegance.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Father said conflict develops the character

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

nobody hαs ever meαsured, not even poets, how much the heαrt cαn hold.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Look at history,” Eva continued, rubbing a temple. “Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stole entire passages to write The Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.

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

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.

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

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.

Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty

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

Living is cold and technical without you, a death mask of itself.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Maybe I’m getting tired – I can’t think of anything but nights with you. I want them warm and silvery.

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

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

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.

. . . 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?

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

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

... 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.

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

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 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-

Some of us are born rebellious. Reading the story of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford, I identified with her mutinous spirit. I remember passing shopwindows with my mother and asking why people didn’t just kick them in. She explained that there were unspoken rules of social behavior, and that’s the way we coexist as people. I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us. I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones. Still, the small rule-hating self within me did not die.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do we like these stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, The Titanic: how the might are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in AMerica is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. Is is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

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…

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.