beth > beth's Quotes

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“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

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“She sleepwalked from moment to moment, and whole months slipped by without memory, without bearing the faintest imprint of her conscious will. ”
― Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
― E.E. Cummings, Selected Poems

“I am exhausted by trying to get along with the Lord.”
― Louise Rennison, Away Laughing on a Fast Camel

“Dad has brought me a cup of tea in bed this morning! I said, 'Vati, why are you waking me up in the middle of the night? Are you on fire?”
― Louise Rennison, Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants