jo☕ > jo☕'s Quotes

“Don’t set yourself on fire trying to keep others warm.”
― Penny Reid, Beard in Mind

“Roses have both petals and thorns, my dark flower. You needn’t believe something weak because it appears delicate. Show the world your bravery.”
― Kerri Maniscalco, Stalking Jack the Ripper

“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 why 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly 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. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody 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

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be.”
― Cisneros, Sandra

“Not a flat. Not an appartement in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own.”
― Cisneros, Sandra

“Butterflies are too few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.”
― Cisneros Sandra

“You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.”
― Cisneros Sandra

“the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing”
― Cisneros Sandra

“At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver”
― Cisneros Sandra

“We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”
― Cisneros Sandra

“Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.”
― Cisneros Sandra

“Why are you giving these guys your time? Why are you settling for crumbs when you deserve the whole damn cake?”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“I know I can be too much, but I think I’m just enough for you. I have no interest in forcing you into anything,” he continues. “But I want you to know that this past month with you has been the very best I’ve ever had. I should have told you that last night, but I was overwhelmed and nervous and everything came out wrong. Arrangement or no, everything I’ve felt with you, everything I’ve said to you—” He shakes his head slightly, that smile finally tripping from his eyes to the curve of his cheeks. I get the barest hint of a dimple before it’s gone again. “It’s been the most honest—the most real thing I’ve ever felt.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“You keep showing me pieces of yourself that I want to collect like seashells.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“He didn't kiss her," my grandmother offers from the stove. "When she wanted to be kissed."

Charlie leans back in his seat with a heavy, disappointed exhale. "Dude." His eyes are like saucers. "You gotta kiss her when she wants to be kissed.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“There may be plenty of fish in the sea, but most of those fish are bottom-dwellers with weird lanterns hanging off the front of their faces.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“You look nice,” he says, voice hoarse. “I look like a drowned rat.” “A nice one, though.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“Why can’t I find a single human being that I connect with? My standards are not impossible. I want someone who makes me laugh. Who cares about what I do and what I say and what I think. I want to sit on the couch with someone in blissful, perfect, comfortable silence—pizza on the coffee table and my feet tucked under their thigh. I want someone to hand me the recipe section of the local paper while they read the headlines. I want to share all of my small, silly, silent moments. I want someone to give me butterflies.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“I collect my frustration like Gabe’s wayward assignments and stack it into something neat and tidy in my chest.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“Where are you from?” he asks. The depths of hell. Sent to destroy men who lie on the internet and are mean to those in the service industry.”
― B.K. Borison, Mixed Signals

“Portagioie, the Italian word for jewelry box, is a compound of two polyvalent words. Gioia (pl. gioie) means both “joy” and “jewel.” Porta, meanwhile, derives from the Latin verb portāre, and belongs to a constellation of words pertaining to acts of bearing, bringing, carrying, and transporting, which in turn give rise to terms for “door,” “gate,” and “port.” Portagioie, therefore, could also be interpreted, in Italian, not only as a box of jewels, but a container of joy, a doorway or gateway to joy, something that brings joy.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“The idea of spending money, of buying myself something lovely but unnecessary, has always burdened me. Is it because my father would scrupulously count out his coins, and rub his fingers over every bill before giving me one in case there was another stuck to it? Who hated eating out, who wouldn't order even a cup of tea in a coffee bar because a box of tea bags in the supermarket cost the same? Was it my parents' strict tutelage that prompts me to always choose the least-expensive dress, greeting card, dish on the menu? To look at the tag before the item on the rack, the way people look at the descriptions of paintings in a museum before lifting their eyes to the work?”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts