Zelda Fitgerald

On Zelda:
"Her letters are tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance. How strange to have failed as a social creature-even criminals do not fail that way-they are the laws 'Loyal Opposition', so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken dialogues that they cannot read."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

From Zelda:
"I don't want to live -- I want to love first, and live incidentally."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves."