23 Quotes & Sayings By Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on June 22, 1896. She is the only child of Charles Arthur "C.A." Ogden and Frances Margaret Taliaferro Taliaferro. Her father was a successful mining engineer who later became the president of the Eagle Silver Company, an influential mining company in Alabama. He died suddenly of blood poisoning in 1909, just after Zelda had turned five years old Read more

Her mother took care of Zelda during most of her childhood. Her mother's health declined rapidly following her husband's death and she died in 1917 at the age of forty-nine. Zelda Fitzgerald grew up in Montgomery and moved with her mother to Fayetteville, North Carolina, when she was nine years old. She attended public schools there and then went on to study at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

In 1918 she began what would be her only real love affair while still a teenager: a brief marriage to an older man named Douglas Robinson with whom she lived for two years while she completed her education at Wellesley and earned a degree in English literature. The relationship ended when he asked for a divorce and Zelda returned to Montgomery where she waited until she met and married Ernest Hemingway in 1921; they were divorced two years later. She continued to live with her parents until 1924 when she left for Paris where she lived for eight years before moving to Key West, Florida, with her second husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald (the son of "C.A.'s" partner), whom she divorced in 1932; Zelda subsequently moved back to Paris where she lived until 1940 when she moved back to the United States and settled in Wyoming. In 1945, after serving as a nurse during World War II and raising one son (Ernest Hemingway) and one daughter (Scottie Fitzgerald), Zelda committed suicide by shooting herself in the head from close range with a twelve gauge shotgun that had been given to her by Hemingway shortly after their divorce.

The gun was still loaded when it fired because it had not been unloaded properly according to Hemingway's instructions shortly before he left for Africa on safari less than three weeks earlier. Hemingway's body was discovered in his hotel room in Ketchum, Idaho, four days after he committed suicide using a shotgun provided by his friend Erskine Caldwell. He was thirty-six years old when he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a twelve gauge shotgun that had been given to

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the...
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Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. Zelda Fitzgerald
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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...
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I don't want to live, I want to love first and live incidentally. Zelda Fitzgerald
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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
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.. . 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
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I don’t want to live– 
I want to love first, and live…incidentally. Zelda Fitzgerald
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring. Zelda Fitzgerald
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Nobody has ever measured not even poets how much the heart can hold. Zelda Fitzgerald
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I don't want to live- I want to love first and live incidentally. Zelda Fitzgerald
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Nobody has ever measured even poets how much a heart can hold. Zelda Fitzgerald
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The purpose of life on earth is that the soul should grow - So Growl By doing what is right. Zelda Fitzgerald