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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 683e5d4 | One way or another the no doubt mad idea entered my mind that my own actions had historic importance and this fantasy (?) made it appear that people who harmed me were interfering with an important experiment. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 6d00d2a | You don't know the meaning of true love if you think it can be deliberately selected. You just love, that's all. A natural force, irresistible. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 3610eda | Sometimes I wished I could become a shoemaker too. | Saul Bellow | ||
| db59e72 | In the end you can't save your soul and life by thought. But if you , the least of the consolation prizes is the world. | Saul Bellow | ||
| 56e9d46 | Why does everything that lives have to die? < So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious. | forever precious precious-life | Chaim Potok | |
| 6e1924c | This was a dank, sinister chill: the chill of shadows where poison toadstools grown, their ruddy colors beckoning a child to come, come take a taste of candy. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| 3030db1 | I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 3b89e0d | Already she feels jaded. Weary, and gladly tired and old. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 2ac04ce | I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him | Sylvia Plath | ||
| ed4b767 | So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor -- you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, poss.. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| d63103b | I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 9ff4aeb | I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| eaf26ea | I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 279bdd4 | I've been wondering. . . I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something." Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative -- the face of a man who often does not get what he wants." | Sylvia Plath | ||
| e31e321 | The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. | fear-of-failure growing-up inadequacy school | Sylvia Plath | |
| 23a40be | I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 57593a5 | There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. 'Is there no way out of the mind?' Sylvia Plath famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations.. | Matt Haig | ||
| 0056dac | I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. I thought I would spend the summer reading "Finnegan's Wake" and writing my thesis. Then I would be way ahead when college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead of swotting away with no make up and stringy hair, on a diet.. | wandering-thoughts | Sylvia Plath | |
| fd4482d | I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| ee92b8b | Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 29bbbe5 | The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor. | liver | Sylvia Plath | |
| 881e857 | Why do my beheld beauties vanish and deform themselves as soon as I look twice. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 0b18a53 | I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water. | water | Sylvia Plath | |
| 5e260e5 | What is it that teaching kills? The juice, the sap - the substance of revelation: by making even the insoluble questions & multiple possible answers take on the granite assured stance of dogma. It does not kill this quick of life in students who come, each year, fresh, quick, to be awakened & pass on - but it kills the quick in me by forcing to formula the great visions, the great collocations and cadences of words and meanings. The good te.. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| df0d6ac | Yet I liked him too much... way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn't get to hurt me more than it did. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 5bb2400 | Water will run by rule; the actual sun / Will scrupulously rise and set; / No little man lives in the exacting moon / And that is that, is that, is that. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 66bfd6d | O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. From the poem "Cut", 24 October 1962" | Sylvia Plath | ||
| e19bc09 | What a man wants is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| 77fb7df | I cry at everything. Simply to spite myself and embarrass myself. | Sylvia Plath | ||
| b1899b2 | Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade. | John Updike | ||
| fe14e53 | On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life. Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky about the rooftops. A sky shimmery with the possibilities of the death; lights exaggerated, the heavens peeled back- a swirling haze of.. | Oscar Hijuelos | ||
| 615ee01 | So help me God it gets more and more preposterous, it corresponds less and less to what I remember and what I expect as if the force of live were centrifugal and threw one further and further away from one's purest memories and ambitions... | John Cheever | ||
| 4f7559b | In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life. | joy-of-life joy-of-seeing painting | Orhan Pamuk | |
| 48a83a2 | SrWH SHb dkn yHb lklm lwjyz b'n lzby'n fy lHqyq@ l yshtrwn l'lbs@, bl yshtrwn khylan. m 'rdw shrh fy lHqyq@ hw 'n ykwnw mthl "lakhryn" ldhyn yrtdwn tlk l'lbs@." | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 28f3994 | It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| d410fef | The city's more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth. | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| 857998a | There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? The only harm they do is to themselves. But that's all they ever wanted in the first plac.. | guilt orhan-pamuk others-suffering snow the-poor | Orhan Pamuk | |
| dd2b6a8 | I read a book one day and my whole life was changed" starts Orhan Pamuk to his famous and brilliantly written book: The New Life. Some books just strike you with the very first sentence, and generally those are the ones that leave a mark in your memory and soul, the ones that make you read, come back many years later and read again, and have the same pleasure each time. I was lucky enough to have a father who was passionate about literature.. | Samad Beh-Rang | ||
| 4c89068 | My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of distancing myself from God than from distancing myself from the sense of community shared by the entire city . | religion | Orhan Pamuk | |
| fb3147b | In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself? | Orhan Pamuk | ||
| cf23e1b | There were times when [he] allowed himself to see clearly that he would end his working life, that was to say, his conscious thinking life, in this task, that all his thoughts would have been another man's thoughts, all his work another man's work. And then he thought it did not perhaps matter so greatly... It was a pleasant subordination, if he was a subordinate. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 7cc4559 | The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries, but present at family meals, where their developing characters were taken seriously and rationally discussed, over supper or during long country walks. And yet, at the same time,.. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| 37f715e | There is a peculiar aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board. | A.S. Byatt | ||
| a454b8c | I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a sufficiently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the .. | A.S. Byatt |