Love Quote by Zelda Fitzgerald

A line like this only sounds romantic until you remember who’s saying it: Zelda Fitzgerald, writing from inside a marriage that doubled as a brand and a battleground. “I don’t want to live” isn’t a melodramatic death wish so much as a refusal of the default script: the dutiful, managed life where women are expected to survive neatly, age quietly, and treat desire as a private problem. Her pivot - “I want to love first” - makes love not a garnish on life but its organizing principle, even if that means letting stability, reputation, and “sense” fall away.

The verb choice matters. “Live” is flat, administrative; “love” is active, consuming. Then she lands the knife with “incidentally,” a word from business memos and legal clauses. It’s witty and bleak: living becomes a side effect, something that happens while you pursue the real thing. That’s a cultural critique tucked into a confession. In the Jazz Age, love was marketed as freedom and modernity, but for women it often came bundled with dependence, surveillance, and erasure. Zelda’s sentence flirts with that mythology while exposing its cost.

There’s also a warning inside the glamour. To make love primary is to risk being devoured by it - by a husband’s ambition, by public fascination, by your own hunger for intensity. The line doesn’t resolve that tension; it performs it. It’s the sound of someone trying to choose desire over endurance, even as endurance is what she’s going to be forced to do.