tuna > tuna's Quotes

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“Elizabeth Bennet: I'm very fond of walking. Mr. Darcy: Yes... yes I know. (from Pride & Prejudice, the movie)”
― Jane Austen

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

“With me, the present is forever and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand…hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women—wives, mistresses, “kept” women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an “erotic perversion,”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the Other? The question is how, in her, nature has been taken on in the course of history; the question is what humanity has made of the human female.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Death! mysterious, ill-visaged friend of weak humanity! Why alone of all mortals have you cast me from your sheltering fold? Oh, for the peace of the grave! the deep silence of the iron-bound tomb! that thought would cease to work in my brain, and my heart beat no more with emotions varied only by new forms of sadness!”
― Mary Shelley, The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Fiction of Mary Shelley

“And the more I live, the more I dread death, even while I abhor life. Such an enigma is man -- born to perish -- when he wars, as I do, against the established laws of his nature.”
― Mary Shelley, The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Fiction of Mary Shelley

“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If there is something right in Beauvoir's claim that one is born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. As an ongoing discursive practice, it is open to intervention and resignification.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“The things we see are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend