Bookstruck > Bookstruck's Quotes

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Her lips touched his brain as they touched his lips, as though they were a vehicle of some vague speech and between them he felt an unknown and timid preasure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odor.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“You can still die when the sun is shining.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The sad quiet grey-blue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”
― Philip Larkin

“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
― Philip Larkin

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
― Sylvia Plath , The Collected Poems

“we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail
among sacred islands of the mad till death
shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

--from "Tale of A Tub", written 1956”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.

From the poem "Cut", 24 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Though it's quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I hurl my heart to halt his pace.

--from "Pursuit", written 1956”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole---
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

--from "Insomniac", written April 1961”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

--from "Tulips", written 18 March 1961”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Worse even
than your maddening
song, your silence." -”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then -- ”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems