B > B'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

“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 didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― 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

“O God, make me good, but not yet.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“A wound gives off its own light
surgeons say.
If all the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound
by what shines from it.”
― Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

“I've been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That's gold. Keep that way, it's a good way to be.”
― Susan E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death...”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“The air is all softness.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way...I can't apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to... We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful...We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“And amid all the splendours of the World, its vast halls and spaces, and its wheeling fires, Ilúvatar chose a place for their habitation in the Deeps of Time and in the midst of the innumerable stars.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet: A Television Script. Adapted by Michael Benthall and Ralph Nelson for presentation on the CBS Television Network by the Old Vic Company on February 24, 1959 at 9:30 EST.

“But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?

GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot.

HAMLET: I pray you.

GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot.

HAMLET: I do beseech you.

GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord.

HAMLET: It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with our fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.

HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet