as you would like to believe in yourself.

“He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

A favorite of mine. 

the beginning and the end of it.

Lately I've kind of had a thing for the Fitzgeralds.
You know, F. Scott and Zelda.
And I've said before how I obsess over little things then research them to death.
Well, ever since I saw Midnight in Paris, these two have been on my mind.
I literally think about them all the time (a little much? probably.)

But please, humor me.
And just enjoy some of the gems I found.

Like what Scott had to say about Zelda:
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be…I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of it.”

And what she wrote to him:

“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-chain or button-hole bouquet—to the world.”

A little interview where Scott decided to ask some questions of his own (and Zelda's brilliant response):
"What do you want your daughter to do, Mrs. Fitzgerald, when she grows up?" Scott Fitzgerald inquired in his best reportorial manner, "not that you'll try to make her, of course, but--"
"Not great and serious and melancholy and inhospitable, but rich and happy and artistic. I don't mean that money means happiness, necessarily. But having things, just things, objects makes a woman happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes. They are great comforts to the feminine soul."

I found that last one in Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (a book that has moved to the top of my: to purchase list.)

Can you see it?
Why I'm so in love with them?
I've been reading a lot of Fitzgerald in and out of school this year and I can't get enough of these guys. The royalty of the Jazz Age. Their tragic lives. All of it intrigues me.

I could go on and on about why I love these quotes so much. Why the words make me giddy, but I think they stand alone beautifully.

And here's one more to savor:
“Why should graves make people feel in vain? Somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived.” (Zelda)