Isabella > Isabella's Quotes

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”
― Anais Nin

“She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”
― Yoko Ono

“When things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“The world had taken a deep breath and was having doubts about continuing to revolve.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You’ve likely never seen me like that. Almost no one has. It has never earned me anything to share my darker self with other people. The only anger I ever expose to the world is through implication, by suggesting that I’m on the brink of no longer being able to contain my fury. That is what a woman’s strength looks like when it’s palatable: like she is containing herself.”
― Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

“There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“Aunts standing close in the kitchen like cigarettes in the pack, uncles splayed on furniture like butts in the ashtray.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.” I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead