sunny > sunny's Quotes

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“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

“In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“All wisdom ends in paradox.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“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

“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

“Sometimes the darkness wins. It creeps in like a thick, gray fog, covering everything as we stumble around, and when it finally lifts, we see what it has done, what it has taken from us and what it has left behind.”
― Alison Wisdom, We Can Only Save Ourselves

“We take pains, always, to assure our children of their safety; we remind them we will protect them. But we cannot control the way the earth moves, and a reality of living here, one we exchange for a beautiful home: sometimes the earth revolts. The sea churns with anger, cliffs crumble. The ground shakes, it splits open. It isn’t often—only enough to remind us everything has cracks, everything can break.”
― Alison Wisdom, We Can Only Save Ourselves

“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

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It is funny,” she said, “that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient. I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father’s halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“She moved like a wave herself, graceful, but with relentless, driving motion.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“But I'm going now where it's always hot
Where blizzards ain't and cold is not
Where everyone's happy and anthems ringing
But having no voice I'll be out of the singing
Don't weep for me now, don't weep for me ever
I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.
- Untitled Poem, Lorne Knight, Summer 1923”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“One night while Ada slept, the wind swept in and blew her skin boat out to sea. She had only used it twice, but she cried all day when she discovered it was gone. Then she cried all the next day and the next. It was too much. Ada was tired and she was weak and there was no one to help her. If she did not get up out of bed to forage for food, she would go hungry. If she did not light the fire, it would remain unlit. If she did not bring in the snow, there would be no water to drink. Eventually she grew tired of crying and pitying herself. She must get up and make another boat, and so she did.”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“Her world was lonely and silent. Now that there was open water, there was no longer the crash of the ice pack, the long, low grind of the floes churning against one another, the deep and sudden splash of water as masses of the pack broke off and plunged into the sea, or the staccato burst like rifle shots that echoed across the island as the ice expanded. There was only the sound of her own voice as she spoke to Vic. She fussed over the cat like a mother and picked up and held her in her arms and talked to her like she had talked to Crawford and the others. Vic was a warm, breathing creature, who responded in purrs and rubs and an occasional meow. Ada thought she would go insane without her.”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“She had always covered her ears when the men fired their rifles because the sound was so violent and terrible. Now, as the birds soared past, she knew she must make a decision. Summoning all her courage, she pulled the trigger.”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“She heard the man calling, "Keep to the left, if you want to get home and see your father and mother." But she kept running along the smooth road, and just then she looks back, and she is out of the sea and into the air; and as she looks back the trail behind her fades away...
- Ada Blackjack, "The Lady in the Moon”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“Real history is made up from the documents that were not meant to be published.
- Mrs. Rudolph Martin Anderson, in a letter to the mother of Allan Crawford, the young Canadian placed in charge of the Wrangel Island expedition party.”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“Is it possible that somewhere there are people even now being ostracized by their kind for eating olives with a fork or peas with a knife? People who judge a man by his grooming, his bank account, or his ancestry? Our new world has stripped us to the fundamentals; and it is salutary, if not a little humbling, to reflect that these fundamentals--intelligence, character, and health--are not peculiarly human, that they are the same with men, with horses, with dogs, and with ants.
- Harold Noice, captain of the Donaldson, the ship that saved sole survivor Ada Blackjack of the Wrangel Island expedition, describing the Arctic”
― Jennifer Niven, Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”
― Henry David Thoreau

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire