Clara > Clara's Quotes

“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

“Hey Sarge, remember me?”
― Holly Jackson, As Good As Dead

“Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears?”
― Holly Jackson, As Good As Dead

“if it's a choice between me and you, i choose you”
― Holly Jackson, As Good As Dead

“Microwave him.”
― Holly Jackson, As Good as Dead

“Our dad killed your boyfriend's older brother and kept a girl in his loft for five years. You have yourself two experts at acting normal.”
― Holly Jackson, As Good As Dead

“Cara’s dad is giving you a lift back. If you get home before Mum and I are back from the cinema, will you let the dog out for a wee?”
― Holly Jackson, Kill Joy

“Smallpox,' ' Zach read aloud when the page was passed to him.
'It was eradicated by the nineteen eighties,' Pip said.
'Oi, no time travel.' Jamie whacked her on the head with his master booklet.”
― Holly Jackson, Kill Joy

“Pip found that—most of the time—other people only slowed you down. That was why she despised group projects.”
― Holly Jackson, Kill Joy

“Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“You make me lovely, and it’s so lovely to be lovely to the one I love.…”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“I do my best thinking at night when everyone else is sleeping. No interruptions. No noise. I like the feeling of being awake when no one else is.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
"Go," she says. "He waits for you."

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.”
― 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

“Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I feel the need to say something grand and poetic, but the only thing I come up with is “It’s lovely.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

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

“...stories can make someone immortal as long as someone else is willing to listen.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library