1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2037
2038
2039
2040
2041
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 96a9952 | The lawn was white with doctors | doctors | Sylvia Plath | |
| ddc1512 | I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 2289d55 | The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. (...) It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash it again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| a56d0c7 | Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| defedb6 | I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 7fdfa0f | But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 7919ee5 | Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 1a26dde | The world is blood-hot and personal. --Sylvia Plath | Megan Abbott | ||
| 2a55dfd | Paralytic It happens. Will it go on? ---- My mind a rock, No fingers to grip, no tongue, My god the iron lung That loves me, pumps My two Dust bags in and out, Will not Let me relapse While the day outside glides by like ticker tape. The night brings violets, Tapestries of eyes, Lights, The soft anonymous Talkers: 'You all right?' The starched, inaccessible breast. Dead egg, I lie Whole On a whole world I cannot touch, At the white, tight D.. | paralytic poetry sickness | Sylvia Plath | |
| e2c2931 | Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels put dirt into your face. There you will be forever, in an upright position, blind and silent, and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called by any angel. As strata of rock shift, your finger.. | death-and-dying short-story | John Updike | |
| ce1c5e2 | Will you let me lift you?" he said. "Just let me lift you. Just let me see how light you are." "All right," she said. "Do you want me to take off my coat?" "Yes, yes, yes," he said. "Take off your coat." She stood. She let her coat fall to the sofa. "Can I do it now?" he said. "Yes." He put his hands under her arms. He raised her off the floor and then put her down gently. "Oh you're so light!" he shouted. "Your'e so light, you're so fragi.. | John Cheever | ||
| 4bdce6a | For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 61af024 | But just like believing in God, falling in love is such a sacred feeling that it leaves you with no room for any other passions. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 817d973 | Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they'd had to share their rooms with others. | women womens-rights | Orhan Pamuk | |
| c005492 | If we love someone very much, we know that even if we give him the most valuable thing we have, we know not to expect harm from him. This is what a sacrifice is. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| d86fb30 | All these are true and none. The place is there Is what we name it, and is not. It . | A.S. Byatt | ||
| fb9b711 | It's simply the way things are when people come together out of hurt rather than happiness. When you try to use people as band-aids you merely reinfect the wound, and every moment you spend with them is like a speck of glass working itself deeper into your flesh. | Michael Marshall Smith | ||
| 57f640d | I had seen ardency in men's eyes, but I had only felt it once. With Flauvic, false and therefore easy to dismiss. I suddenly wished that I could feel it now. No, I did feel it. I did have the same feeling, only I had masked it as restlessness, or as the exhortation to action, or as anger. I thought how wonderful it would be to see that spark now, in the right pair of eyes. | Sherwood Smith | ||
| 4a226d5 | Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it. | Joe Haldeman | ||
| 38468af | Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint. | Dennis Lehane | ||
| db483b2 | My daughter squealed again and both Bubba and I winced. It's not an attractive sound, that. It's high-pitched and it enters your ear canals like hot glass. No matter how much I love my daughter, I will never love her squealing. Or maybe I will. Maybe I do. Driving down 93, I realized once and for all, that I love the things that chafe. The things that fill me with stress so total I can't remember when a block of it didn't rest on top of .. | Dennis Lehane | ||
| b04bc30 | Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences. | Dennis Lehane | ||
| eb7afd2 | Those who did remember probably shrugged off the chill of her memory, turned their heads down to the sports page or up toward the approaching bus. The world is a terrible place, they thought. Bad things happen every day. My bus is late. | Dennis Lehane | ||
| c12713b | It didn't take a Harvard economist to figure out that it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who's fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place. | Karin Slaughter | ||
| 7fb0bc0 | Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 63005fc | I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message. | sadness | Aimee Bender | |
| 4d1b254 | I can't tell you exactly what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul. I want to be violated by insight. | wisheses | Aimee Bender | |
| 97581eb | Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom. | Aimee Bender | ||
| 396e3e7 | He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically. | Robert Ludlum | ||
| 6e741d6 | He had so much damn respect he wanted to scream. | isolation respect | Orson Scott Card | |
| 67293ff | So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other. | genius miscommunication war | Orson Scott Card | |
| 1a1bb65 | Whatever your gravity is when you get to the door, remember--the enemy's gate is . If you step through your own door like you're out for a stroll, you're a big target and you deserve to get hit. With more than a flasher. | flasher target | Orson Scott Card | |
| 25da2b6 | I saw, I wrote, and the world changed a little. | Orson Scott Card | ||
| 90c5c95 | She likes us," said Umbo. "I know, I could feel it too," said Rigg. "She's really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children." "Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew." "They were delicious." | Orson Scott Card | ||
| bfc4c2d | She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did . . . It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minu.. | Robin McKinley | ||
| 50effed | Rosie hated her curly golden hair. When she was old enough to hold minimal conversations, the itsy-bitsy-cutesycoo sort of grown-ups would pull the soft ringlets gently and tell her what a pretty little girl she was. She would stare at this sort of grown-up and say, "I am not pretty. I am intelligent. And brave." The grown-ups usually thought this was darling, which only made her angry, perhaps partly because she was speaking the truth, alt.. | Robin McKinley | ||
| 532007f | There is so much in the world for us if we only have the eyes to see it, and the heart to love it, and the hand to gather it ourselves- so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in which to delight, and for which to be thankful for. | literature thankful | l.m. montgomery | |
| 8cd0dcf | Afterall," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string." ~ Anne, Anne of Avonlea, Chap. 19" -- | l-m-montgomery | L.M. Montgomery | |
| 37dfe5a | You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is of no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat... | love rememberance | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | |
| e31c32e | But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity. | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | ||
| cb83ce5 | Why should anyone be frightened by a hat? | hat hats | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | |
| db82303 | But, of course, for those of us who understand life, we would not care less about figures. | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | ||
| 22b6a47 | In times of struggle, there are as many reasons not to read as there are to breathe. Don't you have bigger things to do? Reading, let alone re-reading, is the terrain of milquetoasts and mopey spinsters. At life's ugliest junctures the very act of opening a book can smack of cowardly escapism. Who chooses to read when there's work to be done? Call me a coward if you will, but when the line between duty and sanity blurs, you can usually find.. | Erin Blakemore | ||
| cfc6e3e | It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest. | Laura Ingalls Wilder |