Shelby > Shelby's Quotes

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
― Franz Kafka

“Yours

(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“You cannot love me, much as you would like; you are unhappily in love with your love for me, but your love for me is not in love with you.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

“I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“But what shall I do when instead of a heart this fear is beating in my body?”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons. But his reckoning involves a”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
― Sylvia Plath

“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

“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“How we need another soul to cling to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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

“What did my fingers do before they held him?”
― Sylvia Plath

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.

--from "Cut", written 24 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition