Lina > Lina's Quotes

“I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. 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

“I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? - - - That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“…What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind, and stupid.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The thing I realize is, that it's not what you take, it's what you leave.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The great thing about this life of ours is that you can be someone different to everybody.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257-foot bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I do my best thinking at night when everyone else is sleeping. No interruptions. No noise. I like the feeling of being awake when no one else is.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I am on the highest branch.
We are written in paint.
I believe in signs.
The glow of Ultraviolet.
A lake. A prayer. It's so lovely to be lovely in Private.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Sorry wastes time. You have to live your life like you'll never be sorry. It's easier just to do the right thing from the start so there's nothing to apologize for.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“You know what I like about you, Finch? You’re interesting. You’re different. And I can talk to you. Don’t let that go to your head.”
… “You know what I like about you, Ultraviolet Remarkey-able? Everything.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I should be happy, but instead I feel nothing. I feel a lot of nothing these days. I've cried a few times, but mostly I'm empty, as if whatever makes me feel and hurt and laugh and love has been surgically removed, leaving me hollowed out like a shell.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The future is uncertain, but that can be a good thing.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I have this feeling, like I'm waiting for something. But I have no idea what.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Your hope lies in accepting your life as it now lies before you, forever changed. If you can do that, the peace you seek will follow. Forever changed. I am forever changed.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis