Caroline

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,--you must have noticed them in the street,--how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?”
― Emily Dickinson

“It's a GIRL.
It's a little girl, with scrunched-up petal lips and a tuft of dark hair and hands in tiny fits, up by her ears. All that time, that's who was in there. And it's weird, but the minute I saw her I just thought: IT'S YOU. Of course it is.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Shopaholic & Baby

“We'll act as if all this were a bad dream."

A bad dream.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

A bad dream.

I remembered everything.

I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.

But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar