Dee > Dee's Quotes

“They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.

--From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song”
― Sylvia Plath

“I collected men with interesting names.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

“I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. (...) I want, I think, to be omniscient… I think I would like to call myself "The girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but to what extent? I am I.”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“You're always in a rush, or else you're too exhausted to have a proper conversation. Soon enough, the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into your being and become part of you, so everyone can see it, in your posture, your gaze, the way you move and talk.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”
― Allen Saunders

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“There was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Books were safer than other people anyway.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You were her way here, and it's a dangerous thing to be a door.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“I am large, I contain multitudes”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.”
― Jacques Derrida

“How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Don't blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“I've got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don't want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before 'thin'. And frankly, I'd rather they didn't give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls.”
― J.K. Rowling

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“What you seek is seeking you.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“...the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander