“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“Is it the sea you hear in me?
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“No day is safe from news of you.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“I used to pray to recover you.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart -
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.
Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen.
A far sea moves in my ear.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“And we, too, had a relationship—
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“All the gods know is destinations.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“This is a case without a body.
The body does not come into it at all.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Ariel: The Restored Edition
“Listen to me, dear. When life hands you something, you take it, for in all likelihood, there’s a large crisis heading your way.”
― Louise Blackwick, quote from The Weaver of Odds
“I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.”
― Anne Garréta, quote from Sphinx
“Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from El segundo sexo
“It was no easy task to tame the barbarians' language. One quick three-week-old autumn, the brothers were sitting in their cell, trying to write out the letters that men would later call Cyrillic. They were not getting anywhere. Fromm the cell you could clearly see half of October, and in it the silence was one hour's walk long and two hours' walk wide. Then Methodius called his brother's attention to four jugs standing on the window of their cell, but outside, on the other side of the bars. "If the doors were locked, how could I get to one of those jugs?" he asked. Constantine broke one of the jugs, then drew the fragments piece by piece through the bars and into the cell, where he reassembled the jug, bonding it with saliva and clay from the floor beneath his feet. This they now did with the Slavonic language: they broke it in pieces, drew it into their mouths through the bars of Cyril's letters, and bonded the fragments with their saliva and the Greek clay beneath the soles of their feet.”
― Milorad Pavić, quote from Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words
“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.