Sandra > Sandra'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

“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

“Decades of rigorous testing of girls and boys confirm that there are few psychological differences between the sexes, and that the differences seen are heavily shaped by culture, not biology.”
― Angela Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
― Virginia Woolf

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
― Virginia Woolf

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
― Virginia Woolf

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own / Three Guineas

“Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”
― Virginia Woolf

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

“I am rooted, but I flow.”
― Virginia Woolf

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“If you're happy in a dream, does that count?”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Change is one thing. Acceptance is another.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy

“നിന്ന് പിന്നാക്കം നടക്കുന്ന നിമിഷങ്ങളെയെല്ലാം മരണം എന്നു വിളിക്കാമെങ്കില്‍ ഓരോ ആളും എത്രെയോ തവണ മരിക്കുന്നു.”
― K R Meera, Hangwoman

“ഒരാളുടെ സേവനങ്ങള്‍ക്ക് മറ്റൊരാള്‍ നല്‍കുന്ന പ്രതിഫലമല്ല സ്നേഹം. അത് ഒരാള്‍ മറ്റേയാളില്‍ കണ്ടെത്തുന്ന പൂര്‍ണതയാണ്”
― K R Meera