Meg > Meg's Quotes

“Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

“Somehow the ideals of sexual liberation had become twisted until women were being told that if they didn't buy into an increasingly narrow image of what female sexiness looked like, then they must be prudes.
No matter if they were looking for something freer rather than less free, nobody wants to be told they're frigid. So even though this wasn't about disliking sex, but disliking sexism, the label 'prude' had become an effective gag on dissent.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“What's more, throughout much of our society, the image of female perfection to which women are encouraged to aspire has become more and more defined by sexual allure. Of course wanting to be sexually attractive has always and will always be a natural desire for both men and women, but in this generation a certain view of female sexuality has become celebrated throughout advertisements, music, television programmes, films and magazines. This image of female sexuality has become more than ever defined by the terms of the sex industry.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“While girls have always been encouraged to see self-decoration as a central part of their lives, today they are also exposed to a deluge of messages, even at an early age, about the importance of becoming sexually attractive. These dolls are just a fragment of a much wider culture in which young women are encouraged to see their sexual allure as their primary passport to success.
This highly sexualised culture is often positively celebrated as a sign of women's liberation and empowerment.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“This equation of empowerment and liberation with sexual objectification is now seen everywhere, and is having a real effect on the ambitions of young women.
[...]
When we talked about empowerment in the past, it was not a young woman in a thong gyrating around a pole that would spring to mind, but the attempts by women to gain real political and economic equality.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“The rise of a hypersexual culture is not proof that we have reached full equality; rather, it has reflected and exaggerated the deeper imbalances of power in our society. Without thoroughgoing economic and political change, what we see when we look around us is not the equality we once sought; it is a stalled revolution.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“We cannot pretend that this is all about women as victims, when many women are deeply complicit in creating and selling this culture.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“The ease with which prostitution is presented as an acceptable choice for women dismisses the psychological trauma that actually seems to be not the occasional, but the inevitable, result of selling sex.”
― Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

“As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has only an insane irritation.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“She loved three things — a joke, a
glass of wine, and a handsome man.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“Life isn't long enough for love and art.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“I did not believe him capable of love. That is an emotion in which tenderness is an essential part, but Strickland had no tenderness either for himself or for others; there is in love a sense of weakness, a desire to protect, an eagerness to do good and to give pleasure--if not unselfishness, at all events a selfishness which marvellously conceals itself; it has in it a certain diffidence.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― 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

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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

“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

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

“I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

“If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar