“Culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.”
― Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
― Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic
“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“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.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“A life of feminine submission, of 'contemplative purity,' is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of 'significant action,' is a life that must be silenced, a life whose monstrous pen tells a terrible story.”
― The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
― The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Leara’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Leara’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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