β
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of sceneryβair, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.
β
β
Robert Bloch
β
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.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didnβt know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
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.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
because wherever I satβon the deck of a ship or at a street cafΓ© in Paris or BangkokβI would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Touch her, and I'll freeze your testicles off and put them in a jar. Understand?
β
β
Julie Kagawa (The Iron King (The Iron Fey, #1))
β
I couldnβt see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Thatβs 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.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
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.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.
β
β
Laini Taylor (Strange the Dreamer (Strange the Dreamer, #1))
β
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
livid, adj.
Fuck You for cheating on me. Fuck you for reducing it to the word cheating. As if this were a card game, and you sneaked a look at my hand. Who came up with the term cheating, anyway? A cheater, I imagine. Someone who thought liar was too harsh. Someone who thought devastator was too emotional. The same person who thought, oops, heβd gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Fuck you. This isnβt about slipping yourself an extra twenty dollars of Monopoly money. These are our lives. You went and broke our lives. You are so much worse than a cheater. You killed something. And you killed it when its back was turned.
β
β
David Levithan (The Lover's Dictionary)
β
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didnβt taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowersβ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.
It made me tired just to think of it.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldnβt do at all.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that somedayβat college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhereβthe bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
You never called me back," he said. "I called you so many times and you never called me back."
Magnus looked at Alec as if he'd lost his mind. "Your city is under attack," he said. "The wards have been broken, and the streets are full of demons. And you want to know why I haven't called you?"
Alec set his jaw in a stubborn line. "I want to know why you haven't called me back."
Magnus threw his hands up in the air in a gesture of utter exasperation. Alec noted with interest that when he did it, a few sparks escaped from his fingertips, like fireflies escaping from a jar. "You're an idiot."
"Is that why you haven't called me? Because I'm an idiot?"
"No." Magnus strode toward him. "I didn't call you because I'm tired of you only wanting me around when you need something. I'm tired of watching you be in love with someone else - someone, incidentally, who will never love you back. Not the way I do."
"You love me?"
"You stupid Nephilim," Magnus said patiently. "Why else am I here? Why else would I have spent the past few weeks patching up all your moronic friends every time they got hurt? And getting you out of every ridiculous situation you found yourself in? Not to mention helping you win a battle against Valentine. And all completely free of charge!
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
β
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didnβt say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I knew you'd decide to be all right again.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.β¨
β
β
Dark Jar Tin Zoo (Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.)
β
Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
If you have the woman you love, what more do you need? Well, besides an alibi for the time of her husbandβs murder.β¨
β
β
Dark Jar Tin Zoo (Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.)
β
Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.
β
β
Robert Bloch
β
Somebody has to go polish the stars,
They're looking a little bit dull.
Somebody has to go polish the stars,
For the eagles and starlings and gulls
Have all been complaining they're tarnished and worn,
They say they want new ones we cannot afford.
So please get your rags
And your polishing jars,
Somebody has to go polish the stars.
β
β
Shel Silverstein (A Light in the Attic)
β
It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he's trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.
β
β
Sally Rooney (Normal People)
β
Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.
That would fix a lot of people.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day.
Then I knew what the problem was.
I needed experience.
How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector. And just as I suspected, my machine was broken.β¨
β
β
Dark Jar Tin Zoo (Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.)
β
I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,β and, βWhat a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness
And the infinite tenderness shattered you like a jar.
β
β
Pablo Neruda (100 Love Sonnets)
β
The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing you to grow. Without them, it sleeps- seldom to awaken. The sleeper must awaken.
β
β
Frank Herbert
β
I make love with a focus and intensity that most people reserve for sleep.
β
β
Dark Jar Tin Zoo (Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.)
β
I'm worried he's going to...do something crazy."
"He lives in a hole in the ground, dresses funny and occasionally eats his assistants," Eve said. "Define crazy."
Claire closed her eyes. "Okay. I think he wants to put my brain in a jar and wire it into the machine."
Dead silence.
β
β
Rachel Caine (Ghost Town (The Morganville Vampires, #9))
β
I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.
β
β
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
β
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.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
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.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.
β
β
William Shakespeare (Richard II)
β
Iβd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
While Leo fussed over his helm controls, Hazel and Frank relayed the story of the fish-centaurs and their training camp.
'Incredible,' Jason said. 'These are really good brownies.'
'That's your only comment?' Piper demanded.
He looked surprised. 'What? I heard the story. Fish-centaurs. Merpeople. Letter of intro to the Tiber River god. Got it. But these brownies--'
'I know,' Frank said, his mouth full. 'Try them with Ester's peach preserves.'
'That,' Hazel said, 'is incredibly disgusting.'
'Pass me the jar, man,' Jason said.
Hazel and Piper exchanged a look of total exasperation. Boys.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
β
He smiled like he couldn't help it. She couldn't believe it. He was actally smiling, teeth and all. Had she ever seen him smile before? No, she realized, because right now, it was such a jarring thing to witness that for a moment it felt as though she was sharing the car with a stranger.
β
β
Kelly Creagh (Nevermore (Nevermore, #1))
β
Relius looked away. "He said that you...cried," he said softly.
"But not that he cried as well," said the queen, amused at the memory. "We were very lachrymose... would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head."
"Is that when he cried?"
"He ducked," said Attolia dryly.
"I had not pictured you for a fishwife."
"Lo, the transforming power of love.
β
β
Megan Whalen Turner (The King of Attolia (The Queen's Thief, #3))
β
Idiots annoy me.β Mackenzie holds up the jar again, and in goes another dollar. The jar? It was invented by my sister, who apparently thinks my language is too harsh for her offspring. Itβs the Bad Word Jar. Every time someoneβusually meβswears, they have to pay a dollar. At this rate, that thing is going to put Mackenzie through college.
β
β
Emma Chase (Tangled (Tangled, #1))
β
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
β
β
Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls)
β
My husband, Andrius, says that evil will rule until good men or women choose to act. I believe him. This testimony was written to create an absolute record, to speak in a world where our voices have been extinguished. These writing may shock or horrify you, but that is not my intention. It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell somone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.
β
β
Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray)
β
Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying...or busy with other assignments. Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: "To do what needs doing." Look inward. Don't let the true nature of anything elude you. Before long, all existing things will be transformed, to rise like smoke (assuming all things become one), or be dispersed in fragments...to move from one unselfish act to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness...when jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it.
β
β
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
β
We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dogβs yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuumβs scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his motherβs retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on whatβs brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.
β
β
David Foster Wallace (Girl with Curious Hair)
β
And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat...I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
The children came to a perfume shop. In the show window was a large jar of freckle salve, and beside the jar was a sign, which read: DO YOU SUFFER FROM FRECKLES?
'What does the sign say?' ask Pippi. She couldnβt read very well because she didnβt want to go to school as other children did.
'It says, "Do you suffer from freckles?"' said Annika.
'Does it indeed?' said Pippi thoughtfully. 'Well, a civil question deserves a civil answer. Letβs go in.'
She opened the door and entered the shop, closely followed by Tommy and Annika. An elderly lady stood back of the counter. Pippi went right up to her. 'No!' she said decidedly.
'What is it you want?' asked the lady.
'No,' said Pippi once more.
'I donβt understand what you mean,' said the lady.
'No, I donβt suffer from freckles,' said Pippi.
Then the lady understood, but she took one look at Pippi and burst out, 'But, my dear child, your whole face is covered with freckles!'
'I know it,' said Pippi, 'but I donβt suffer from them. I love them. Good morning.'
She turned to leave, but when she got to the door she looked back and cried, 'But if you should happen to get in any salve that gives people more freckles, then you can send me seven or eight jars.
β
β
Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking (Pippi LΓ₯ngstrump, #1))
β
Whatever it is," I said, "the point is moot because as long as I'm on these pills, I can't make contact to ask."
Derek ... snapped, "Then you need to stop taking the pills."
Love to. If I could. But after what happened last night, they're giving me urine tests now."
Ugh. That's harsh." Simon went quiet, then snapped his fingers.
Hey, I've got an idea. It's kinda gross, but what if you take the pills, crush them and mix them with your, you know, urine."
Derek stared at him.
What?"
You did pass chem last year, didn't you?"
Simon flipped him the finger. "Okay, genius, what's your idea?"
I'll think about it. ..."
***
Here," Derek whispered, pressing an empty Mason jar into my hand. He'd pulled me aside after class and we were now standing at the base of the boy's staircase. "Take this up to your room and hide it."
It's a ... jar."
He grunted, exasperated that I was so dense I failed to see the critical importance of hiding an empty Mason jar in my room.
It's for your urine."
My what?"
He rolled his eyes, a growl-like sound sliding through his teeth as
he leaned down, closer to my ear. "Urine. Pee. Whatever. For the testing."
I lifted the jar to eye level. "I think they'll give me something
smaller."
...
You took your meds today, right?" he whispered.
I nodded.
Then use this jar to save it."
Save . . . ?"
Your urine. If you give them some of today's tomorrow, it'll seem like you're still taking your meds."
You want me to . . . dole it out? Into specimen jars?"
Got a better idea?"
Um, no, but ..." I lifted the jar and stared into it.
Oh, for God's sake. Save your piss. Don't save your piss. It's all the same to me."
Simon peeked around the corner, brows lifted. "I was going to ask what you guys were doing, but hearing that, I think I'll pass.
β
β
Kelley Armstrong (The Summoning (Darkest Powers, #1))
β
We'll act as if all this were a bad dream."
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
β
β
Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)
β
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
β
β
Louise Erdrich (Original Fire)
β
Incredible,β Jason said. βThese are really good brownies.β
βThatβs your only comment?β Piper demanded.
He looked surprised. βWhat? I heard the story. Fish-centaurs. Merpeople. Letter of intro to the Tiber River god. Got it. But these browniesββ
βI know,β Frank said, his mouth full. βTry them with Estherβs peach preserves.β
βThat,β Hazel said, βis incredibly disgusting.β
βPass me the jar, man,β Jason said.
Hazel and Piper exchanged a look of total exasperation. Boys.
Percy, for his part, wanted to hear every detail about the aquatic camp. He kept coming back to one point: βThey didnβt want to meet me?β
βIt wasnβt that,β Hazel said. βJustβ¦undersea politics, I guess. The merpeople are territorial. The good news is theyβre taking care of that aquarium in Atlanta. And theyβll help protect the Argo II as we cross the Atlantic.β
Percy nodded absently. βBut they didnβt want to meet me?β
Annabeth swatted his arm. βCome on, Seaweed Brain! Weβve got other things to worry about.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
β
A song of despair
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
β
β
Pablo Neruda