"i took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Wherever I sat-on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok-I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but i don't know many of them."
— Sylvia Plath

"There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?"
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It’s hard to understand, when you are sitting there in your chair, having breakfast or whatever, that giving it up is stronger than holding on, that “letting yourself go” could mean you have succeeded rather than failed. You eat your goddamn Cheerios and bicker with the bitch in your head that keeps telling you you’re fat and weak: Shut up, you say, I’m busy, leave me alone. When she leaves you alone, there’s a silence and a solitude that will take some getting used to. You will miss her sometimes...There is, in the end, the letting go."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"There is, in the end, the letting go."
— Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
— Robert Frost

"The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
— Robert Frost

"These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."
— Robert Frost

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself."
— Robert Frost

"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."
— Robert Frost

"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
— Robert Frost

"Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."
— Nelson Mandela

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
— Oscar Wilde

"That love which does not build a foundation on good sense is doomed."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. "
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."
— William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)

"If you don't know where you want to go, then it does not matter where you go... "
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass)

"How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."
— Sylvia Plath

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
— Sylvia Plath

"Is there no way out of the mind?"
— Sylvia Plath

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."
— Sylvia Plath

"If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"... because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."
— Walt Disney Company

"No, no, I am but shadow of myself:
You are deceived, my substance is not here;"
— William Shakespeare

"I feel it gone, yet know not when it left."
— William Shakespeare

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Madness in great ones must not unwatched go."
— William Shakespeare

"Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)