Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
Zelda FitzgeraldRead
A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the overwhelming and intoxicating nature of certain experiences that can blur the line between reality and illusion.
Zelda Fitzgerald's quote describes the heavy, almost dreamlike atmosphere created by the southern moon, symbolizing how certain moments in life can envelop us in a sense of stagnation and unreality. The comparison of holding onto reality to resisting the euphoric effects of ether suggests that sometimes we are drawn into a beautiful yet suffocating experience where the struggle to remain grounded can feel futile.
In practice
During a poetic reading to emphasize the beauty and complexity of nature's influence on perception.
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.
The night you gave me my birthday party... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best.
There seemed to be some heavenly support beneath his shoulder blades that lifted his feet from the ground in ecstatic suspension, as if he secretly enjoyed the ability to fly but was walking as a compromise to convention.
I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.
And, Joey, if you ever want to know about the japonicas and the daisy fields it will be alright that you have forgotten because I will be able to tell you about how it felt to be feeling that way you cannot quite remember – that will be for the time when something happens years from now that reminds you of now.
I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.
But suppose one doesn't quite know which one wants to put first. Suppose," said Harriet, falling back on words which were not her own, "suppose one is cursed with both a heart and a brain?" "You can usually tell," said Miss de Vine, "by seeing what kind of mistakes you make. I'm quite sure that one never makes fundamental mistakes about the thing one really wants to do. Fundamental mistakes arise out of lack of genuine interest. In my opinion, that is.
No matter how much we try to run away from this thirst for the answer to life, for the meaning of life, the intensity only gets stronger and stronger. We cannot escape these spiritual hungers.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody to communicate to others. . . . Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small dainty task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
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