Z A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

We spent a good lot of time perfecting our kissing skills

He’s all words, no substance

Won’t we be quite the pair?—you with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile.

Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed

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.

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

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

I wanted him to tell me more about how he’d done it, written a whole entire novel, and about what he liked to read, and I wanted to tell him what I liked to read, and then we could talk about things from those books. India, for instance; I’d been reading Kipling since forever. And Joseph Conrad’s made-up Costaguana, from Nostromo—had he ever heard of it? Where exactly did he think it was? Tarzan of the Apes—had he read that one? Africa, now that was a place to talk about!

None of the boys I knew had much interest in books. For them it was football and horses and hounds. I looked at Scott there in the rosy light, his hair and skin and eyes aglow with joy and ambition and enthusiasm, and was dazzled

In those captivating eyes was what Mama would call “an intention.” A spark, or sparkle; a glint or gleam. The fairy tales I’d read throughout my childhood were full of such words for such looks