Isabella > Isabella's Quotes

“Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
― Audre Lorde

“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Words: with them you can do and undo as you please.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

“Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.”
― Elena Ferrante, Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading, and Anonymity

“As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.”
― Elena Ferrante, Fragments: Elena Ferrante on Writing, Reading, and Anonymity

“Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.”
― Elena Ferrante

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joy of living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it's great to be alive! Thank you. Thank you.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“The core of mans' spirit comes from new experiences.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild