Abigail > Abigail's Quotes

“Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It was sometime in October, she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

“I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made. For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind organism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to stop the unsavory changes, the rat race, the death unwish - the winged chariot, the horns and the motors, the Devil in the clock. Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods, but a rather pedestrian pair of muddled suburbanites who, no matter how bumbling they tried, never could quite understand how or why you grew up to your 21st birthday.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”
― Sylvia Plath

“To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I've crossed some kind of invisible line. I feel as if I've come to a place I never thought I'd have to come to. And I don't know how I got here. It's a strange place. It's a place where a little harmless dreaming and then some sleepy, early-morning talk has led me into considerations of death and annihilation.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories

“You've got to work with your mistakes until they look intended. Understand?”
― Raymond Carver, Cathedral

“to live is to harbour so many profound losses.”
― Anthony Holden, Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them

“To draw you closer, the psychopath creates an aura of desirability—of being wanted and courted by many.”
― Peace, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, & Other Toxic People

“You will become stronger than you could ever imagine. You will understand who you are truly meant to be. And in the end, you will be glad it happened.”
― Jackson MacKenzie, Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People

“How many summers had I been alive? The obvious answer was as many summers as my age; but I felt the presence of another number, a different, more real number somewhere out there in the world.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that ever be your home.”
― Roma Tearne, Mosquito

“All freedom is relative—you know too well—and sometimes it’s no freedom at all, but simply the cage widening far away from you, the bars abstracted with distance but still there, as when they “free” wild animals into nature preserves only to contain them yet again by larger borders. But I took it anyway, that widening. Because sometimes not seeing the bars is enough”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Maybe in the next life we'll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we're capable of. Maybe we'll be the opposite of buffaloes. We'll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home. Green Apple.

Like snow covering the particulars of the city, they will say we never happened, that our survival was a myth. But they're wrong. You and I, we were real. We laughed knowing joy would tear the stitches from our lips.

Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field- it was always there- where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more.

As a rule, I miss you.

As a rule,"little" is always smaller than "small". Don't ask me why.

I'm sorry I don't call enough.

Green Apple.

I'm sorry I keep saying How are you? when I really mean Are you happy?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I remember learning that saints were only people whose pain was notable, noted.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“There is so much I want to tell you, Ma. I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it.
I don't know what I'm saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don't know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“They say if you want something bad enough you’ll end up making a god out of it. But what if all I ever wanted was my life, Ma?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it a friendship, I said to myself.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Your hands are hideous—and I hate everything that made them that way. I hate how they are the wreck and reckoning of a dream.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous