Nancy Milford Quotes

#1. I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it,

Nancy Milford

#2. But it was not her beauty that was arresting. It was her style, a sort of insolence toward life, her total lack of caution, her fearless and abundant pride.

Nancy Milford

#3. The hats were nearly all as though made by somebody who had once heard about flowers but never seen one huge muffs of horror.

Nancy Milford

#4. Zelda was a creature who overflowed with activity, radiant with desire to take from life every chance her charm, youth, and intelligence provided so abundantly.

Nancy Milford

#5. It was not, Zelda wrote, prosperity or the softness of life, or any instability that marred the war generation; it was a great emotional disappointment resulting from the fact that life moved in poetic gestures when they were younger and had since settled back into buffoonery.

Nancy Milford

#6. To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.

Nancy Milford

#7. He fought for his very survival. If he fought dirty sometimes that does not diminish the fact that he refused to give up.

Nancy Milford

#8. In reality, there is no materialist like the artist, asking back from life the double and the wastage and the cost on what he puts out in emotional usury.

Nancy Milford

#9. Life is impermanent and in the face of that impermanence, cavort! Look death in the eye, tell him you're as cute as a button, flash a little deviant guile his way, and tell him to go feast on somebody's else's sweet flesh.

Nancy Milford

#10. I hope I'll never get ambitious enough to try anything. It's so much nicer to be damned sure I could do it better than other people - and I might not could if I tried...

Nancy Milford