Sara > Sara's Quotes

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“[I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I dare to say I am like no one in the whole world.]”
― Anne Lister, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister: Volume I

“Obsessions are the only things that matter.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“What a comfort is this journal. I tell myself to myself and throw the burden on my book and feel relieved.”
― Anne Lister, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries, 1791-1840

“O books! books! I owe you much. Ye are my spirit’s oil without which, its own friction against itself would wear it out.”
― Anne Lister, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister: Volume I

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“How sweet the thought that there is (still) another & better & happier world than this.”
― Anne Lister, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

“Were I fit for another world, how gladly would I go there.”
― Anne Lister, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
― Mary Shelley

“Burnt… Mr Montagu’s farewell verses that no trace of any man’s admiration may remain. It is not meet for me. I love, & only love, the fairer sex & thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.”
― Anne Lister, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister: Volume I

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I am very low. The tears gush as I write but, thank God, I generally feel relief from thus unburdening my mind on paper... Oh, how my heart longs after a companion & how I often wish for an establishment of my own, but I
may then be too old to attach anyone & my life shall have passed in that dreary solitude I so ill endure.”
― Anne Lister, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.”
― John Milton

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“You are aware of only one unrest;
Oh, never learn to know the other!
Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is striving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.
If there be spirits in the air
That hold their sway between the earth and sky,
Descend out of the golden vapors there
And sweep me into iridescent life.
Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Dusk was falling quickly. It was just after 7 P.M., and the month was October.”
― Patricia Highsmith, A Dog's Ransom

“And she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Who am I, anyway? Does one exist, or to what extent does one exist as an individual without friends, family, anybody to whom one can relate, to whom one’s existence is of the least importance?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Tremor of Forgery

“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.”
― John Milton

“But when they kissed goodnight in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials which put together inevitably created desire.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow?”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt