Mae > Mae's Quotes

“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

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
― Sylvia Plath

“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

“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

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

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”
― Peter De Vries, Reuben, Reuben

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”
― Hemingway, Ernest

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden

“All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Now is no time to think of what you do not have.
Think of what you can do with that there is”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“All things truly wicked start from innocence.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women

“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Wild Years