OA > OA's Quotes

“ثم إن بطاقة الهوية دائماً فيها اختصار، تلخيص لحكاية طويلة عريضة مُركبةوممتدة وغير قابلة للتلخيص، أختزال لا يفى، ولكنه يشير.”
― رضوى عاشور, الطنطورية

“و في الحلق غُصَّة مُعَلقة لا ترحم. محشورة عند اللهاة لا تختنق فأستريح من الحكاية كلها ولا تحل عنك لتتنفس كباقي الخلق تعيش.”
― رضوى عاشور, الطنطورية

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
― Walt Whitman

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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

“I dream a dream that dreams back at me”
― Toni Morrison, A Mercy

“This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Paths of the mirror"

I
And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true.

II
But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp
edge of the night.

III
Like a girl made of pink chalk on a very old wall that is suddenly washed away by the rain.

IV
Like when a flower blooms and reveals the heart that isn’t there.

V
Every gesture of my body and my voice to make myself into the offering,
the bouquet that is abandoned by
the wind on the porch.

VI
Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you will be and scare the girl you once were.

VII
The night of us both scattered with the fog. It’s the season of cold foods.

VIII
And the thirst, my memory is of the thirst, me underneath, at the bottom, in the hole,
I drank, I remember.

IX
To fall like a wounded animal in a place that was meant to be for revelations.

X
As if it meant nothing. No thing. Mouth zipped. Eyelids sewn. I forgot.
Inside, the wind. Everything closed and the wind inside.

XI
Under the black sun of the silence the words burned slowly.

XII
But the silence is true. That’s why I write. I’m alone and I write. No, I’m not alone.
There’s somebody here shivering.

XIII
Even if I say sun and moon and star I’m talking about things that happen to me. And what did I wish for? I wished for a perfect silence.
That’s why I speak.

XIV
The night is shaped like a wolf’s scream.

XV
Delight of losing one-self in the presaged image. I rose from my corpse, I went looking for who I am.
Migrant of myself, I’ve gone towards the one who sleeps in a country of wind.

XVI
My endless falling into my endless falling where nobody waited for me –because when I saw who was waiting for me I saw no one but myself.

XVII
Something was falling in the silence. My last word was “I” but I was talking about the luminiscent dawn.

XVIII
Yellow flowers constellate a circle of blue earth. The water trembles full of wind.

XIX
The blinding of day, yellow birds in the morning. A hand untangles the darkness, a hand drags
the hair of a drowned woman that never stops going through the mirror. To return to the memory of the body,
I have to return to my mourning bones, I have to understand what my voice is saying.”
― Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972

“Since my house burned down
I now have a better view
of the rising moon”
― Mizuta Masahide

“I’m sorry if you couldn’t find me I have been in the woods. I put myself there because I couldn’t be good. I have been running with foxes and hunting with crows. And I have found myself a home where no body goes.”
― Florence Welch, Useless Magic: Lyrics and Poetry