Julia Miller > Julia's Quotes

“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
― Sylvia Plath , The Collected Poems

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“If only one’s eyes weren’t visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one’s eyes from the world.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Dreams overlaid with dreams, a palimpsest of horror.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”
― Sylvia Plath, Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

--from "Poem For A Birthday - The Stones", written 1959”
― Sylvia Plath, The Colossus and Other Poems

“There are only two ways to be a god: through creation or murder.”
― Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

“I collected men with interesting names.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I’m not an animal anymore, sister,” she said, first scanning the empty ward as if about to disclose a momentous secret. “I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“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

“But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was the very life that her body represented. The sunlight that came splintering through the wide window, dissolving into grains of sand, and the beauty of that body that, though this was not visible to the eye, was also ceaselessly splintering…the overwhelming inexpressibility of the scene beat against him like a wave breaking on the rocks, alleviating even those terrifyingly unknowable compulsions...”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian, The Vegetarian

“What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“But no matter how you die, the world always stays the same.”
― Young-Ha Kim, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

“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

“Was he a normal human being? More than that, a moral human being? A strong human being, able to control his own impulses?”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“I am myself. That is not enough.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“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

“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“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

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

--from "Daddy", written 12 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The Greatest Generation?
They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War 11. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are miseducating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War 11 prepares us--innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others--for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”
― Howard Zinn

“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Character is fate.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wait and ache.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath