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.

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.

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

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

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Death is the only real elegance.

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

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

Pronunciation has made many an innocent word sound like a doctor's orders for a stomach pump.

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

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

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

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

I suppose all we can really share with people is a taste for the same kinds of weather.