Ophelia Quotes

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd!

Be patient, Ophelia. Love, Hamlet

Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I'll draw a sketch of thee. What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?... 'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do: Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself? Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile? I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave? Be buried quick with her, and so will I: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou.

I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them. 'How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.

Ophelia was bonkers, right? And Juliet was what, a sixth-grader?

As Hamlet said to Ophelia, ”God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." The battle between these two halves of identity...Who we are and who we pretend to be, is unwinnable. "Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness, within each of us is the capacity for both good and evil. But those who are able to blur the moral dividing line hold the true power.

What's your hurry?" Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia.

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history.

Tis in my memory lock'd, And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Too much of water hast thou poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears. But yet it is our trick, let shame say what it will. when these are gone the women will be out! Adieu my lord, I have a speech of fire that fane would blaze, But that this folly doubts it.

The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire.

I always walked the ragged edge.

Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Ophelia: No, my lord. Hamlet: DId you think I meant country matters? Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord. Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. Ophelia: What is, my lord? Hamlet: Nothing.

What is a man's life but a prelude to his death? And what is death but a long sleep, a most welcome forgetfulness.

The Mad Scene. Enter Ophelia!

She sinks. She sinks in holy sadness. Like an Ophelia in tears she sinks

When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. (Ophelia)

Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled-up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor.

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts... There’s fennel for you, and columbines; there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died. They say he made a good end,— [Sings.] “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy. Thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness. Song. And will a not come again? And will a not come again? No, no, he is dead; Go to thy deathbed; He never will come again. His beard was as white as snow, Flaxen was his poll. He is gone, he is gone, And we cast away moan. God ’a’ mercy on his soul.

Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.

What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

Alone in my chamber, I fairly trembled with excitement. How could it be that I, who had never been kissed before, had kissed the Prince of Denmark himself, not once but many times? Did he really speak to me of love? It was beyond belief that I, humble Ophelia, should be wooed by Prince Hamlet. Surely I had imagined it.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

The past wasn't always beautiful to look at, but the errors of the people who has preceded her on Earth had also become her own. If Ophelia had learned one thing in life, it was the errors were indispensable for personal development.

Perhaps," said Miss Ophelia, "it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm.

She kissed his scars, first the one cutting through his eyebrow, then the one cutting into his cheek, and finally the one cutting across his temple. With each contact, Thorn's eyes widened. His muscles, conversely, tightened. "Fifty-six." He cleared his throat to make his voice less hoarse. Ophelia had never seen him so intimidated, despite his efforts not to show it. "Thats the number of my scars." She closed and then reopened her eyes. She felt it again, even more violently, this urgent call from inside her. "Show them to me.

Being queer is hard enough. Don’t lock yourself out of all of this just because you’re scared you won’t fit in the keyhole, without even trying.

But I want it done now, " said Miss Ophelia. What's your hurry?" Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia.

You seem to be developing a real talent for finding dead people, Ophelia.

She speaks much of her father; says she hears There’s tricks i’ the world; and hems, and beats her heart; Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt, That carry but half sense. (Ophelia)

In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no--true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. Now no comfort avails any more; longing transcends a world after death, even the gods; existence is negated along with its glittering reflection in the gods or in an immortal beyond. Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence; now he understands what is symbolic in Ophelia's fate; now he understands the wisdom of the sylvan god, Silenus: he is nauseated. Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity. The satyr chorus of the dithyramb is the saving deed of Greek art; faced with the intermediary world of these Dionysian companions, the feelings described here exhausted themselves.

He never was worth the powder it'd take to blow him to hell.

Authenticity is an “owning” of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable.

Young men need to be socialized in such a way that rape is as unthinkable to them as cannibalism.

I drank a portion of her blood, just enough to keep the virus under control, but not enough to kill her. It was like drinking one of Ophelia’s cocktails. The alcohol in her bloodstream filled me with dizzy thoughts, while the blood filled the virus with more hunger.

And just like that, I’ve become a romantic. I blame Bruno Mars.

O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be…

Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn't obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.

we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

She was running out of the room as fast as she could, with the sword raised before her. She called back to her father. "I'll be back soon. I've just got to save the world.

HAMLET MAY HAVE BEEN A TRAGEDY. BUT OPHELIA DESERVED A COMEDY

When everything else crumbles to dust, all we have left are the memories. I thought of Ophelia, wandering the theater, mind half gone...Never shall I cut from memory my sweet love's beauty.

The perks of being queer.

Ophelia was beating some poor underling for not knowing her arse from the sparse collection of cells between her ears.

With her whole body, Ophelia sensed what he had become to her, what she had become to him, and nothing in the world seemed as solid.

In the fifteen or so years he has known her, A.J. thinks Ismay has aged like an actress should: from Juliet to Ophelia to Gertrude to Hecate.

I think you're wonderful too, Hal!" Stephan said, in a workmanlike approximation of Ophelia's breathless, admiring tones. The crew laughed even harder. Lydia snorted through her nose.

It’s about finding your own twisted perfection, letting yourself fall too far and taking a chance. If you’ve done all that. You have no reason to give up. Not now.

Phantom Your heart must be a ghost. I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul

Maybe it's not about whether my crushes work out in the end. Maybe it never was. Maybe it's about letting myself have them. Letting myself feel love and lust and heartbreak, my own version of magnificent misery in the process, and never changing my heart for anyone's benefit but my own. I don't mind being the lover, the one who waits, but I won't hesitate to love myself with all I've got in the meantime.

Girls struggles with mixed messages: Be beautiful, but beauty is only skin deep. Be sexy, but not sexual. Be honest, but don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Be independent, but be nice. Be smart, but not so smart you threaten boys.

But you know so many men,” Ophelia said, “isn’t there even one for you?” “They’re all adjectives,” I said, “they all make me feel modified; even a word like girl friend gives me this feeling I’ve been cut in half. I’d rather just be a car, not a blue car or a big one, than sit there the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.

The streets of Copenhagen are filled with people who oddly look not like Prince Hamlet and Ophelia, and that strikes the cord of bizarre sadness within your heart, and drives you into the weirdly unsettled state.

she had attempted to poison me. Believe me when I say this woman gave me butterflies in my stomach. Though that might just be internal bleeding. Either way, she had charmed me.

Is this a prologue or a posy of a ring? Ophelia: Tis brief, my lord Hamlet: As woman's love.

I may doubt the truths of the world, but never again will I doubt whether or not the person that I am, or may be, is loved or worthy of love. I know myself, and I don’t. Both can be true. I am not Ophelia: daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes, lover of Hamlet. I am Ophelia Rojas: daughter of Miguel and Stella, best friend of Sammie and Agatha, aspirational lover to many, many boys and one girl. And I am so much more, just waiting to be discovered.

There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice; others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.

I thought I was the crazy one," she continued. "I mean, who the hell falls in love in one day?" "We the hell do.

She had killed and she had liked it, and he surely would have delighted to see her as she was now. Half-mad and fading fast, every inch the Gothic heroine that he’d envisioned. Ophelia, floating dead in the water and haunted by ghosts. Lilith, crafted from the earth instead of as a subjugate of the flesh, drawn to the fiercely blazing beauty of an angel only to find that the brilliant light singed as cruelly as the fires of hell. A fallen woman, drawn to her Lucifer. A cautionary tale to those who refused to bend to the natural order and fell in love with the wrong kind of man.

You set up your place in my thoughts, moved in and made my thinking crowded.

Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.

It was seeing these worn-out men that really allowed Ophelia to take the measure of this world in which she found herself. There were those who danced at the ball, enclosed in their bubbles of illusion, and those who kept the whole machine going.

Q: Why do you blog? A: Partly to make Butterflies and Wheels more frequently updated and more interactive (as well as that bit more interesting, I hope), but also because I think the world des-perately needs to hear my opinions, and I like to oblige.

Another vital skill is managing pain. All the craziness in the world comes from people trying to escape suffering. All mixed up behaviour comes from unprocessed pain. People drink, hit their mates and children, gamble, cut themselves with razors and even kill themselves in an attempt to escape pain. I teach girls to sit with their pain, to listen to it for messages about their lives, to acknowledge and describe it rather than to run from it. They learn to write about pain, to talk about it, to express it through exercise, art, dance or music.

My mother read it when she was a teenager," Henry said, picking a piece of lint off his lap. "To Kill a Mockingbird. The day she accepted my father's proposal, she gave him a copy and told him that Atticus Finch is the kind of father she wants her husband to be.

And contrast Mary Kathleen, if you will, with my wife Ruth, the Ophelia of the death camps, who believed that even the most intelligent human beings were so stupid that they could only make things worse by speaking their minds. It was thinkers, after all, who had set up the death camps. Setting up a death camp, with its railroad sidings and its around-the-clock crematoria, was not something a moron could do. Neither could a moron explain why a death camp was ultimately humane.

Simone de Beauvoir believed adolescence is when girls realize that men have the power and that their only power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects. They do not suffer from the penis envy Freud postulated, but from power envy.

I teach girls certain skills. The first and most basic is centering. I recommend that they find a quiet place where they can sit alone daily for 10 to 15 minutes. I encourage them to sit in this place, relax their muscles and breathe deeply. Then they are to focus on their own thoughts and feelings about the day. They are not to judge these thoughts or feelings or even direct them, only to observe them and respect them. They have much to learn from their own internal reactions to their lives.

If I have to do battle with you a thousand times to prove my point, I'll do it.' The queen unwisely asked, 'But to prove what point, my dear Hamlet?' 'That I loved Ophelia! Fifty thousand brothers, with all the love they can summon, would not equal my love for here. Ophelia, Ophelia.

One slice of key lime pie. Two forks.' I felt Todd’s hand on my arm. 'You’ll thank me later.' No doubt I would.

Ah, yes, tea. Our family's first line of defense when meeting a disaster.

The problem with magic was that it made her feel very alone.

If your heart loses the ability to trust, you'll never love again.

Ich weiß, dass Sie Gefühle für eine Schwäche halten. Aber am Ende sind Sie der einzige Grund, um überhaupt zu leben.

In dem Moment wurde mir etwas klar: Ich war kein Wolf unter Schafen mehr. Jetzt war ich ein Wolf unter Schakalen. Ein kleiner flauschiger Wolf unter großen, blutrünstigen Schakalen. Die Nahrungskette hatte gerade ein Upgrade bekommen.

Finally I teach the joys of altruism. Many adolescent girls are self-absorbed. It's not a character flaw, it's a developmental stage. Nonetheless, in makes them unhappy and limits their understanding of the world. I encourage girls to find some ways to help people on a regular basis.

shows the destructive forces that affect young women. As a girl, Ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction ; rather she struggles to meet the demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is determined utterly by their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to please. When Hamlet spurns her because she is an obedient daughter, she goes mad with grief. Dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a stream filled with flowers.

I On the calm black water where the stars are sleeping White Ophelia floats like a great lily; Floats very slowly, lying in her long veils... - In the far-off woods you can hear them sound the mort. For more than a thousand years sad Ophelia Has passed, a white phantom, down the long black river. For more than a thousand years her sweet madness Has murmured its ballad to the evening breeze. The wind kisses her breasts and unfolds in a wreath Her great veils rising and falling with the waters; The shivering willows weep on her shoulder, The rushes lean over her wide, dreaming brow. The ruffled water-lilies are sighing around her; At times she rouses, in a slumbering alder, Some nest from which escapes a small rustle of wings; - A mysterious anthem falls from the golden stars. II O pale Ophelia! beautiful as snow! Yes child, you died, carried off by a river! - It was the winds descending from the great mountains of Norway That spoke to you in low voices of better freedom. It was a breath of wind, that, twisting your great hair, Brought strange rumors to your dreaming mind; It was your heart listening to the song of Nature In the groans of the tree and the sighs of the nights; It was the voice of mad seas, the great roar, That shattered your child's heart, too human and too soft; It was a handsome pale knight, a poor madman Who one April morning sate mute at your knees! Heaven! Love! Freedom! What a dream, oh poor crazed Girl! You melted to him as snow does to a fire; Your great visions strangled your words - And fearful Infinity terrified your blue eye! III - And the poet says that by starlight You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils White Ophelia floating, like a great lily.

Mr Bott sits down and gestures gracefully to the board. "As you are clearly both fascinated by this text, would you like to explain the significance of Laertes in Hamlet?" He looks at Alexa. "Please go first, Miss Roberts." "Well..." Alexa says hesitantly. "He's Ophelia's brother, right?" "I didn't ask for his family tree, Alexa. I want to know his literary significance as a fictional character." Alexa looks uncomfortable. "Well then, his literary significance is in being Ophelia's brother, isn't it? So she has someone to hang out with." "How very kind of Shakespeare to give fictional Ophelia a fictional playmate so that she doesn't get fictionally bored. Your analytical skills astound me, Alexa. Perhaps I should send you to Set Seven with Mrs White and you can spend the rest of the lesson studying Thomas the Tank Engine. I believe he has lots of buddies too.

I've written of you so often I think I've made you immortal.

Now, I did know a certain young lady of the 'romantic' generation of not so long ago who, after being mysteriously in love for several years with a certain gentleman whom she could have married at any time without the least difficulty, suddenly broke off their relationship, inventing for herself all manner of insurmountable obstacles, and one stormy night plunged from a high, precipitous cliff into a fairly deep and fast-flowing river, where she perished from her own caprice solely through her attempt to imitate Shakespeare's Ophelia, for, had the precipice, which she had long before singled out and been compulsively drawn to, been less picturesque, and had there been only a prosaically flat bank in its stead, perhaps there would have been no suicide at all.

It’s quite simple, really. Someone offers me chocolate cake or donuts or something, I kind of black out, then come to and I’m covered in crumbs and feel like I want to barf, and yet I have no recollection of eating anything. It’s the strangest thing.

And you do know I’m the one who decides who I date”—she glared at Sam—“not you. If I want to drag this guy into the janitor’s closet and have my way with him, that’s none of your business.” “Drag me into a closet?” Hunter asked, his eyebrows up near his hairline. “Offer to buy me dinner first, then I’m all yours.

No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.

There are many different experiences that cause girls to relinquish their true selves. In early adolescence girls learn how important appearance is in defining social acceptability. Attractiveness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for girls' success. This is an old, old problem. Helen of Troy didn't launch a thousand ships because she was a hard worker. Juliet wasn't loved for her math ability.

Adolescent girls discover that it is impossible to be both feminine and adult. Psychologist I. K. Broverman’s now classic study documents this impossibility. Male and female participants in the study checked off adjectives describing the characteristics of healthy men, healthy women and healthy adults. The results showed that while people describe healthy men and healthy adults as having the same qualities, they describe healthy women as having quite different qualities than healthy adults. For example, healthy women were described as passive, dependent and illogical, while healthy adults were active, independent and logical. In fact, it was impossible to score as both a healthy adult and a healthy woman.

She drifted, feather-like, in tenuous radiance… Her gown, it seemed a thing made out of mist, As though the dewy air Had gathered in a cloud about her form To clothe a shape so fair That nothing coarser could adorn it than A layer of atmosphere.

We talk about the disappointments of early adolescence - the betrayals by friends, the discovery that one is not beautiful by cultural standards, the feeling that one's smartness is a liability, the pressure to be popular instead of honest and feminine instead of whole. I encourage girls to search within themselves for their deepest values and beliefs. Once they have discovered their own true selves, I encourage them to trust that self is the source of meaning and direction in their lives.

The soft wool blend of his sweater felt itchy compared to his skin. Even though we’d been together all night, I couldn’t get over the feel of him, his taste, that potent, delicious smell of his neck. I was higher than a fan at a Bob Marley concert.

He feels ennui depression adrift in his life. Purposeless, perhaps because —dig a well in the Sudan and thejanjaweed come in and shoot the people anyway —buy mosquito nets and the boys you save grow up to —rape women —set up cottage industries in Myanmar and the army —steals them and uses the women as slaves and Ben is starting to be afraid that he is starting to share Chon’s opinion of the human species that people are basically shit.

But sometimes, when you’ve known someone for years and they build up this image of you, it’s hard to talk about things that mess with that image. It feels like you’d be breaking some bond of trust between you and that person by being different than you were before. I don’t just mean subtle, slow changes. I mean, like, the big things that they never saw coming.

He may have been helping me out of a pretty huge bind, but I wasn’t about to trust him, despite the way he was watching me with that almost-smile, and the way one stray lock of dark hair had fallen across his forehead, begging for my fingers to push it back then continue running through his hair.

But I don’t think the truest love is deemed so because it’s the most painful. Waiting for someone to love you back seems beautiful in a miserable way when you’re young. No offense.” She smiles. “But a life spent waiting is not a life spent loving. It’s a life spent wasting away on the promise of something you’re not guaranteed.

And you might think a name is just a name, nothing but a word, but that is not the case. Your name is tacked to you. Where it has joined you, it has seeped into your skin and into your essence and into your soul. So when they plucked my name from me with their spell, it was as heavy as a rock in their hands but as invisible as the wind, and it wasn't just the memory of my name, but me myself. A tiny part of me that they took and stored away.

The most important question for every client is "W X ho are you?" I'm not as interested in an answer as I am in teaching a process that the girl can use for the rest of her life. The process involves looking within to find a true core of self, acknowledging unique gifts, accepting all feelings, not just the socially acceptable ones, and making deep and firm decisions about values and meaning. The process includes knowing the difference between thinking and feeling, between immediate gratification and long-term goals, and between her own voice and the voices of others. The process includes discovering the personal impact of our cultural rules for women. It includes discussion about breaking those rules and formulating new, healthy guidelines for the self. The process teaches girls to chart a course based on the dictates of their true selves. The process is nonlinear, arduous, and discouraging. It is also joyful, creative and full of surprises.

There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits. The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you! You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes. The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do. I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason. And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every hawk and gillyflower ... oh, I don't even know what I'm talking about half the time. I just run with it, creating some of the SEMINAL TOURS DE FORCE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. You're welcome.