Iris > Iris's Quotes

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
― 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

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I think I made you up inside my head.”
― Sylvia Plath

“If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

(This quote is probably wrongly attributed to Sylvia Plath)”
― Sylvia Plath

“I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
― Joan Didion

“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

“I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.”
― Sylvia Plath

“I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“And she finds it difficult to believe—that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Potential has a shelf life.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale