Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

Zelda Fitzgerald was the quintessential flapper--inspiration for her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald and a writer in her own right. She lived life to the fullest, but she also found herself teetering on the precipice of madness. Here are some quotes from 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
  
  
• "I am really only myself when I'm somebody else whom I have endowed with these wonderful qualities from my imagination."
  - 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
  
  
• "I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally."
  - 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
  
  
• "It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves."
  - 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, Save Me the Waltz
  
  
• "Mr. Fitzgerald--I believe that is how he spells his name--seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home."
  - Zelda Fitzgerald
  
  
• "Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the human heart can hold."
  - Zelda Fitzgerald
  
  
• "Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest."
  - Zelda Fitzgerald
  
  
• "She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring."
  - Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings
  
  
• "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, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda
  
  
• "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."
  - 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
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "Youth doesn't need friends -- it only needs crowds."
  - Zelda Fitzgerald