amanda > amanda's Quotes

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed”
― Kristin Chang

“I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties

“I took a step toward her." It is my right to reside in my own mind.It is my right,"I said." It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them. "The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever." You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
― Joan Didion

“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

“He who best discerns the worth of time is most distressed whenever time is lost.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“To course across more kindly waters now
my talent's little vessel lifts her sails,
leaving behind herself a sea so cruel;
and what I sing will be that second kingdom,
in which the human soul is cleansed of sin,
becoming worthy of ascent to Heaven.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“People truly engaged in life have messy houses.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“A story is not like a road to follow… it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
― Alice Munro, Selected Stories

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Freely we serve
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall.”
― John Milton

“Farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear”
― John Milton