One of my favorite quotes is by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”

While F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of America’s most celebrated writers, biographies about him and his wife, Zelda reveal flawed individuals fraught with pain. They had an extravagant lifestyle and spent much of their early marriage in pursuit of excess. His struggles with alcoholism and hers with mental illness led to sad lives for them both. But his ornate writing style is one of my favorites. He used elaborate descriptions, clever similes, and put many of his own life experiences into his fiction.

I love this quote from “The Great Gatsby”. It is a great example of his style:

“He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like the ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

I have read books by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but one of my favorites is a work of fiction about his wife: “A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald” by Therese Fowler.

It’s Only Words #6