Knoll Mari > Knoll's Quotes

“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought--Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you one of these.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Come along,' she said. 'They're waiting.'
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress (something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness; she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well, Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with Dalloway; but it didn't seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on the ground and talked-he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, 'She will marry that man,' dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Sir William said he never spoke of 'madness'; he called it not having a sense of proportion.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The strange thing on looking back was the purity, the integrity of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“(But he could not bring himself to say he loved her; not in so many words.)”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Everyone has friends who were killed in the War. Everyone gives up something when they marry.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Me thinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Don't let the man bring you down.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“If more Africans had eaten missionaries, the continent would be in better shape.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman

“Can I do it? I'd rather not try and fail."

"That's stupid talk, Maya. Every try will not succeed. But if you're going to live, live at all, your business is trying. And if you fail once, so what? Old folks say, Every shuteye ain't sleep and every goodbye ain't gone. You fail, you get up and try again.”
― Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman