Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

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

One illusion is as good as another.

Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure ... another chance in life.

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!

There's nothing on earth to do here but look at the view and eat. You can imagine the result since I do not like to look at views.

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

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

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

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

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

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.

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.

“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. It's so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.' 'So easy to be loved - so hard to love.' David answered.

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

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.

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.

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

Other people's ideas of us are dependent largely on what they've hoped for.

Father said conflict develops the character

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.

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

It's terrible to allow conventional habits to gain a hold on a whole household; to eat, sleep and live by clock ticks.

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.

Why do we spend years using up our bodies to nurture our minds with experience and find our minds turning then to our exhausted bodies for solace?

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

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 can't read or sleep. Without hope or youth or money I sit constantly wishing I were dead.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Why should all life be work, when we all can borrow. Let's think only of today, and not worry about tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

isn't it funny how danger makes people passionate?

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

Love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth.

Women, despite the fact that nine out of ten of them go through life with a death-bed air either of snatching-the-last-moment or with martyr-resignation, do not die tomorrow--or the next day. They have to live on to any one of many bitter ends.

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.

Nothing annoys me more than having the most trivial action analyzed and explained.

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.