Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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

With adolescent Nietzscheanism, she already planned to escape on the world's reversals from the sense of suffocation that seemed to her to be eclipsing her family, her sisters, and mother. She, she told herself, would move brightly along high places and stop to trespass and admire, and if the fine was a heavy one - well, there was no good in saving up beforehand to pay it. Full of these presumptuous resolves, she promised herself that if, in the future, her soul should come starving and crying for bread it should eat the stone she might have to offer without complaint or remorse. Relentlessly she convinced herself that the only thing of any significance was to take what she wanted when she could. She did her best. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

Why is there happiness and comfort and excitement where you are and no where else in the world. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

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

One illusion is as good as another. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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- — 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

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

Death is the only real elegance. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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? — Zelda Fitzgerald

We quarreled in the gray morning dew about morals; and made up over a red bathing suit. — 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

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

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own. — 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

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

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? — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

Father said conflict develops the character — 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

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

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 take a sun bath and listen to the hours, formulating, and disintegrating under the pines, and smell the resiny hardihood of the high noon hours. The world is lost in a blue haze of distances, and the immediate sleeps in a thin and finite sun. — 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

Nothing could have survived our life. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Zelda Fitzgerald

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. — 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