Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Experience teaches you how to do things you never want to do again.

One illusion is as good as another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

isn't it funny how danger makes people passionate?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Death is the only real elegance.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Father said conflict develops the character

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!