Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“Remember, lad," said the newt, "If it's going to be tommorow, it might as well be today. And if it is today, it could have been yesterday. If it was yesterday, then you're over and done with it, and can write your own book. Think about that.”
― Avi, The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail and an Even Smaller Ant

“Now give me a kiss, say you love me and off you go."
"Sure, Aunt Lu," I said, and I gave her the kiss she wanted. Then I ran out and caught my bus. I didn't say I loved her. I guess I did. But asking someone to say they love you--and she always asked--is like buying yourself a birthday present. It's more than likely exactly what you want. But it must make you feel awfully sad to get it.”
― Avi, Sometimes I Think I Hear My Name

“She can be fierce, but for all of that she's actually kindness itself.”
― Avi, The Escape from Home

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
― Rumi

“She loved him so much she concealed his name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her.”
― Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing

“Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.”
― Rumi

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“...you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

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

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
― 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

“What did my fingers do before they held him?”
― 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

“What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

(This quote is probably wrongly attributed to Sylvia Plath)”
― Sylvia Plath

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“Talking won't change it. But sometimes it was what she wanted most, to tell someone; often, though, she just wanted to escape those horrid feelings, to escape herself, so there was no pain, no fear, no ugliness.”
― Melissa Marr, Ink Exchange

“Besides the alternate universe offered by a book, the quiet space of a museum was my favorite place to go. My mom said I was an escapist at heart . . . that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one. It’s true that I’ve always been able to yank myself out of this world and plunge myself into another.”
― Amy Plum, Die for Me

“For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?”
― Kamila Shamsie, Kartography

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.”
― Benedict Cumberbatch

“I spent the rest of the day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.”
― Amy Plum, Die for Me

“This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Tell me again about the girl whose hands
have no color. Whose hands are completely
white. This time make them damned, or
untouched, or have her open a red umbrella

or point at some maple leaves and damned
near cry. Those hands. As freakish goes,
I wish I had a tail. Maybe then you’d know
how much I like you. It shakes me through,

damn through. It shakes me. When she carries
a peacock feather. When she touches her neck
or thighs. You’re a person. It’s not so bad.
You have hands. You are a person with hands

to hold things. Things you like. Tremendous
things. Tell me what you will hold today. I
know there is room for everything. There is no
need to be ceremonious. Tell what gets let go.”
― Rebecca Wadlinger