Literary Birthday – 24 July – Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald was born on 24 July 1900 and died on 10 March 1948.

Zelda Fitzgerald Quotes

1. Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
2. 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.
3. I love you anyway-even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life – I love you.
4. I don’t want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.
5. 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.
6. Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.
7. Living is cold and technical without you, a death mask of itself.
8. I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.
9. 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.
10. It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, writer, and socialite, best known as the wife of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. A celebrated icon of the Roaring Twenties, she and Scott spent much of the decade living in Europe, where they became symbols of the Jazz Age. As Scott struggled to complete his fourth novel, Zelda pursued her own creative ambitions. She wrote short stories for magazines, painted, swam, and devoted herself to ballet, a passion she had cultivated since childhood. In 1930, she experienced a mental breakdown and spent the following year in psychiatric clinics across Europe. After the Fitzgeralds returned to the United States, she was admitted to the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore, where she wrote her only published novel, Save Me the Waltz. Zelda continued writing while receiving treatment, but on 10 March 1948, she died in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, leaving an unfinished manuscript behind.

Source for Image: Studio photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zelda_Fitzgerald_circa_1919_Retouched.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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