Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

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

~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Zelda Fitzgerald

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

~ Zelda Fitzgerald