Anne Ballon > Anne's Quotes

“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”
― Anne Carson

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.”
― Anne Carson

“Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.”
― Anne Carson

“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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

“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

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

“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
― Sylvia Plath , The Collected Poems

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

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

“It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive (...). But whatever you took home from the movies was only part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours - which is the more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

“You can say what you want, but I know you don’t want us to become too, well, what? Too human? Too living? But I like being alive. I look out at the endless deep outside the panorama windows. I see a sun. I burn the way the sun burns. I know without a doubt that I’m real. I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.”
― Olga Ravn, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“The word is my fourth dimension.”
― Clarice Lispector

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”
― Clarice Lispector

“You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I am only true when I’m alone.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.”
― Clarice Lispector

“And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."

Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”
― Helene Cixous

“In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience.”
― Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer