pjerrot > pjerrot's Quotes

“I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt moved and tender and perfectly certain about what I was going to do.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was the day after Christmas and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― 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

“If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.”
― Sylvia Plath

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But those missing elements which I think my childhood instinctively craved for were not to be given to me until a good deal later—until perhaps too late—when their assimilation was not possible without a profound upheaval and perhaps a permanent intoxication of my whole being.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[...] the dreadful necessity of saving one's soul, [...]”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“Sin? What was sin?”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“There was something, I thought, very lovely in this habit of the French language which gives it an added grace, tenderness, nuance, sadly lacking in English, with its single use of "you".”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I have often wondered what share Racine had in lighting the flame that began to burn in my heart that night, or what share proximity. If she hadn't read just that play or if she hadn't called me up by chance to sit so near her, in such immediate contact, would the inflammable stuff which I carried so unsuspectingly within me have remained perhaps outside the radius of the kindling spark and never caught fire at all? But probably not; sooner or later, it was bound to happen.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“What a strange relationship exists between the reader and his listener. What an extraordinary breaking down of barriers!”
― Dorothy Strachey

“—a world in which everything was fierce and piercing, everything charged with strange emotions, clothed with extraordinary mysteries, and in which I myself seemed to exist only as an inner core of palpitating fire.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I understand," I cried to myself, "I understand at last. Life, life, life, this is life, full to overflowing with every ecstasy and every agony. It is mine, mine to hug, to exhaust, to drain.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“To sit at table at her right hand was an education in itself.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[...] there in the midst of that life and gaiety, stood a monument of grief, [...]”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“The sun was setting indeed, but triumphantly, gloriously, and shedding on the world an ineffable tenderness in its farewell.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“The train was generally empty at that time. Mlle Julie would lean back in a corner of the dimly lighted carriage and I liked to sit opposite and look at her. I could often do so for a long time without indiscretion, for her eyes were shut. No, she wasn't asleep, but tired. I watched the eyelashes on the cheek, the soft resting eyelids. Was it tired she looked? Not so much tired as sad. Not so much sad as serious. No, it wasn't bitterness in the curving corner of her lips, but an extraordinary sweetness, an extraordinary gravity, an extraordinary nobility. What were her thoughts? Behind those closed lids, what was going on? What had her life been? Had she suffered? She must have suffered to look so grave. Had she loved? Whom had she loved? I think the passion that devoured me at the time was the passion of curiosity. Once, as I was watching her like this, she suddenly opened her eyes and caught me. Her glance held me for a moment, and I was too fascinated to look away. Her glance was piercing, not unkind but terrifying. She was searching me. What did she see?
"Come," she said at last. "Come here and sit beside me."
I think she said it to get rid of my intolerable gaze. After I had obeyed, she put her hand on mine for the space of a heartbeat. I turned my eager palm to clasp it, but she withdrew it gently and sank back again into her corner and her reverie.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“No, it wasn't bitterness in the curving corner of her lips, but an extraordinary sweetness, an extraordinary gravity, an extraordinary nobility.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“She must have suffered to look so grave.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I was conquered afresh [...]”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“Why," said Laura, looking at me with her clear, untroubled eyes, which had a kind of wonder and a kind of recoil in them: "there's nothing else. I just love her.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[there were] moments when it wasn't respect I wanted but something more—human, I called it.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“I was continually conscious that I was incapable and unworthy, continually devoured by vain humilities.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia

“[...] "for now, there's you.”
― Dorothy Strachey, Olivia