athena > athena's Quotes

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

“All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“Carral and Jo, two sets of lips sucking the same man in and out of each other’s mouths. Here lay two Siamese twins, bound together by a thick freckled masculine sinew. And when something pushes in between my labia I’m torn and I scream, blood trickles down my thigh like warm dark fruit juice. Whatever’s in there twists in all the way, crawls up to my black apple and bites, and that’s how we are bound together: Carral and Jo, Carral and Jo together: A black, dead and rotten fruit.”
― Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot

“This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“It's because of you when I'm in bed in the morning that I can wind my spring and tell myself I have to live another good day.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet”
― Plato, The Symposium

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I felt myself float up and away, higher and higher into the ether until my body was just an anecdote, a symbol, a portrait hanging in another world.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I want to say something but shame
prevents me

yet if you had a desire for good or beautiful things
and your tongue were not concocting some evil to say,
shame would not hold down your eyes
but rather you would speak about what is just”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“A poet is different. A poet transforms the world with Such small hands.”
― Caroline Kepnes, You

“We are all of us condemned to loneliness, each and every one of us. You died alone. I'll die alone. You yelled my name when the car fell, I call out yours each and every night of my life. At some point fate will realign our calendars and, if we're lucky, we'll live seventy long years together and then never again.”
― André Aciman, The Gentleman From Peru

“It made Alex uncomfortable, someone demanding love so overtly, showing all her cards. As if it were that easy, as if love were something you deserved and didn’t have to scramble to earn.”
― Emma Cline, The Guest

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

“There was never anything to fear. Which is a little disappointing, frankly. Maybe I wanted to be obliterated.”
― Mona Awad, Rouge

“It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But Nakata wasn't afraid of the darkness or how deep it was. And why should he be? That bottomless world of darkness, that weighty silence and chaos, was an old friend, a part of him already.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore