Joshua > Joshua's Quotes

“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“Oleander time, she said. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind. ”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls.
“Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
"I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“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

“Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn't sick; I was strong.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“I knew how much it hurt to be the daughter of people who can't see you, not even if you are standing in front of them stomping your feet.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“The face you give the world tells the world how to treat you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I’m the girl who trips on the dance floor and can’t find her way to the exit. All eyes on me.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Why? You want to know why?

Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.

Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all, "a disappointment." Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and drink and cut because you need the anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are mainlining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop.

Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.

"Why?" is the wrong question.

Ask "Why not?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“The stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking/stuffing/puking didn't make her skinny, it made her cry.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

“I collected men with interesting names.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

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

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
― Sylvia Plath

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

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

“
Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou