Shanelle Hicks > Shanelle's Quotes

“Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“I love you, even if there isn’t any me, or any love, or even any life. I love you.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“I remember every single spot of light that ever gouged a shadow beside your bones.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald

“I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

“We are only midway through the central verse of our youth when we see ourselves begin to blacken. ... We had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal and suddenly the affair is over.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Under the seams runs the pain.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
― Anne Carson

“Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”
― Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”
― Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“Oh, love is a journey with water and stars,
with drowning air and storms of flour:
love is a clash of lightnings,
two bodies subdued by one honey.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.”
― Pablo Neruda

“When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents' room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction. When the heart grins at itself, the world is destroyed. And I am found alone with the husks and the shells. Then the dangerous moment comes: I am too great to ask for help. I have other hopes. I legislate from the fortress of my disappointments, with a set jaw. Overthrow this even terror with a sweet remembrance: when I was with you, when my soul delighted you, when I was what you wanted. My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terror for one who remembers the Name.”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“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

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
― Sylvia Plath

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“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

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”
“To live,” said Camilla.
“To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Includes eBook, Library Edition

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
― A.A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

“He felt strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare