Jordyn > Jordyn'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

“At that time I could not imagine what would become of me, and I didn't care. It was not judgement day, but another morning.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“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

“No day is safe from news of you.

--from "The Rival", written July 1961”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“She said she hoped I hadn't kept any letters, silly to hang on to things that had no meaning. As though letters and photos made it more real, more dangerous. I told her I didn't need her letters to remember what had happened.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“I kept looking at her, and wondering how we ever had a relationship; yet when she first left me, I thought I had blood poisoning. I couldn't forget her. Now she seemed to have forgotten everything. It made me want to shake her, to pull off all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell, 'Remember this body?' Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Why is the measure of love loss?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“If you want something and can't have it, want something else. Want what you deserve. You'll probably get it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World

“I stared far back into my past and remembered
the child who couldn’t be catalogued by Sears. I
saw her standing in front of her own mirror, in
her father’s suit, asking me if I was the person she
would grow up to become. Yes, I answered her. And
I thought how brave she was to have begun this
journey, to have withstood the towering judgments.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“I thought about the long road I’d traveled. I had
never stopped looking out at the world through my
own eyes. I’d never stopped feeling like me on the
inside. What if the real me could emerge, changed
by the journey. Who would I be? Suddenly, I needed
to know. What would my life be worth if I stopped short of finding out? Fingers of excitement and fear tightened around my throat. Where was I going
now? Who was I becoming? I couldn’t answer those
questions, but even asking them was a sign to me that tumultuous change had been boiling just below the surface of my consciousness.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

“Too late I realise that she has been the Summer of my life. What a slow and painful death this shall be.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“It's hard not to be demolished by the thought of her because I have lived in a body that has loved her and eyes that have witnessed her. She is part of my muscles, my tissue. She is unforgettable.

Presumably, if she ever remembers me, it is only when she catches a perfume that is vaguely familiar, and it takes her hours to recognize it as mine.”
― Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn

“I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion