Z Quotes

“If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Won’t we be quite the pair?—you with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Marry me, Zelda. We'll make it all up as we go. What do you say?”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“There's nothing like losing yourself in someone else's troubles to make you forget your own.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“... while I bathed, while I tried but failed to sleep, I considered how I might become more like the women I respected and admired. Surrounded as I was by ambitious, accomplished women, I couldn't ignore the little voice in my head that said maybe I was supposed to shed halfway, and do something significant. Contribute something. Accomplish something. Choose. Be.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“If the river has a soul, it's a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river's brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Adventure:' there's a word that worked on us both like a charm.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“He smiled then, and I felt that smile like a vibration moving through me, the way you might feel if you walked through a ghost or it walked through you.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds--and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“There was no way to know that certainty would one day become a luxury, too.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“This was Scott. This is Scott, always looking back to try to figure out how to go forward, where happiness and prosperity must surely await.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“I’ve come to wonder whether artists in particular seek out hard times the way flowers turn their faces toward the sun.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“No writer should be the same as another, that’s not art.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“In my experience, there were two kinds of men. One type—no matter how plain or how poor he might be—is always willing to at least try his luck with an attractive girl. The other type looks upon all of those first types with envy.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“This is what we've got at the moment, who we are. It's not nearly what we once had- the good, I mean- but it's also not what we once had, meaning the bad.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek's rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“We glared at each other then, with the kind of hatred that comes from being deliberately wounded in one’s softest, most vulnerable places by a person who used to love you passionately.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Women are formed for love, yes, but also for purpose, and the highest state for a woman—for all humans, in fact—comes when one discovers and then achieves one’s ultimate purpose.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Single women could work all they wanted; married women locked themselves into a gilded cage. All of that had seemed natural before. Now, it made me angry. Now, I saw how a woman might sometimes want to steer her own course rather than trail her husband like a favored dog.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“There would be too much everything and not enough anything, and then where would that leave us?”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“But Zelda, what wouldn't you give to go back to the beginning, to be those people again, the future so fresh and promising that it seems impossible not to get it right?”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“It’s a grown-ups’ playground, isn’t it?”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“I’m Alabama-born, so a transplant here—but I think I could enjoy growing some roots.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Not all writers want to be profound (though an awful lot of them do); some want to entertain, some want to inform; some are trying to provoke the most basic, universal feeling using a minimum of words-I think of Emily Dickinson -to demonstrate how it is to be human in our crazy world today.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Are we rich?" "We're unstoppable.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. —F. Scott Fitzgerald”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“I'd already sensed the attraction between us. it was apparent from the first time we met. But that sort of attraction was so usual that it didn't rate serious attention, let alone concern. When the attraction turned into something that smelled and tasted like substance, though, that was when things got complicated.

A married woman will first deny to herself that anything improper is going on. She'll make excuses for her eagerness to see the man in question. She likes his sharp mind, for example, or his fresh views, or the stories he tells about his experiences, which are so different from her own. She'll dismiss as mere amusement her mind's tendency to wonder where he is and what he's doing, and whether he's thinking of her. She might even avoid the fellow for a day or two to test herself. If she doesn't see him and she feels fine about that, she'll know there's no cause for concern. The test is fake, though, too, because she's lying to herself to make sure she passes the test, which will then justify her choice to see him again, often.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed—but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“...-no, I was a strange new Zelda Sayre released from all constrictions, drunk with the timeless rhythms of sea and sun and passion, more daring and oblivious to danger than I'd ever been before.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald