Quote collection
610 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"
"So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough."
"Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch."
"Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man."
"It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere."
"My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you."
"There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone."
"If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it."
"Oh what a poet I will flay myself into."
"Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones."
"I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire."
"I am too pure for you or anyone."
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow."
"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."
"Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish."
"I am silver and exact.I have no preconceptions."
"... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people."
"Tomorrow is another day toward death."
"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."
"Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals."