Archie > Archie's Quotes

“You're always begging things to love you as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them -- You don't want to love -- your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
― Thomas Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

“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

“No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“No one can usurp the heights...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”
― John Keats

“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“All men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”
― Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”
― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“so whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”
― Gloria Steinem

“You wheedle the soul out of things," he said.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

“Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them?”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

“You know, he said, with an effort, 'if one person loves, the other does.'
…'I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,' she said.
'Yes, but it is - at least with most people,' he answered.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

“It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Is there no way out of the mind?”
― Sylvia Plath

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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

“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 don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss