Quotes By Letter: S
“What sick, ridiculous, puppets we are, and what a gross, little stage we dance on. What fun we have, dancing and fucking, not a care in the world. Not knowing that we are nothing. We are not what was intended.”
-Se7en [movie]
~
“E. Edward Grey: Why do you cut yourself, Lee?
Lee: I don't know.
E. Edward Grey: Is it that sometimes the pain inside has to come to the surface, and when you see evidence of the pain inside you finally know you're really here? Then, when you watch the wound heal, it's comforting... isn't it?
Lee: I... That's a way to put it.”
-Secretary [movie]
Recommended by Dana.
~
“Each cut, each scar, each burn; a different wound or time. I told him what the first one was. I told him where the second one came from--I remembered them all. And for the first time in my life I felt beautiful. Finally part of the earth. I touched the soil, and he loved me back.”
-Secretary [movie]
Recommended by Kristin.
~
“In one way or another I've always suffered. I didn't know why exactly, but I do know that I'm not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I've ever felt and I've found someone to feel with, to play with, to love in a way that feels right for me. I hope he knows that I can see that he suffers too, and that I want to love him.”
-Secretary [movie]
~
“Who's to say that love needs to be soft and gentle?”
-Secretary [movie]
~
“This afternoon's task was to introduce us to the works of William Shakespeare, and once again I was completely captivated by his charm and skill. [..] I loved the undercurrent of hostility that lay beneath the surface of this deceptively beautiful language. It seemed a shame that people no longer spoke this way, and I undertook a campaign to reintroduce Elizabethan English to the citizens of North Carolina.
'Perchance, fair lady, thou dost think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters,' I said to my mother as I ran the vacuum cleaner over the living-room carpet she was inherently too lazy to bother with. 'These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered mat but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman? Were it a punishable crime to neglect thine dwellings, you, my feeble-spirited mistress, would hang from the tallest tree in penitence for your shameful ways. Be there not garments to launder and iron free of turbulence? See ye not the porcelain plates and hearty mugs waiting to be washed clean of evidence? Get thee to thine work, damnable lady, and quickly, before the products of thine very loins raise their collected fists in a spirit born both of rag and indignation, forcibly coaxing the last breath from the foul chamber of thine vain and upright throat. Go now, wastrel, and get to it!'
My mother reacted as if I had whipped her with a short length of yarn. The intent was there, but the weapon was strange and inadequate. I could tell by the state of my room that she spent the next day searching my dresser for drugs.”
-Naked, David Sedaris
~
“She tried to keep her head up, but it continually fell forward and she struggled to get it erect, but the energy was not there and it would hang like a gourd for a few moments, then fall back on her chest, each movement a monumental effort, each failure a death knell. With each breath the tears seemed to build up within her and she could feel and hear them swishing around, feeling them threaten to drown her as her lungs seem to hang limp in her chest. She wanted to cry out, at least to herself, but she forgot that there was someone, something to call out to. There seemed to be a vague sense of recollection in the back of her mind and when she tried to dig it out she once again fell exhausted, and if she hadn't, the drugs and shock treatment would not have allowed her to recognize the word God.”
-Requiem For A Dream, Hubert Selby Jr.
~
“It's not that we don't face things because they are difficult. Things are difficult because we don't face them.”
-Lucio Séneca
Recommended by Paula.
~
“Pain in itself is only sensation and it is our attitudes of resistance to it, and fear, that make it uncomfortable. These attitudes are conditioning and can be released, or simply traded for more fulfilling attitudes. Acceptance and gratitude. Offer it love, instead.”
-Why Seek Painful Experiences?, Mystress Angelique Serpent
~
“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to annihilation. For in the books they write, they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
-The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
~
“Any writer, any artist, I'm sure is obsessed with death, a prerequisite for life.”
-Anne Sexton
~
“Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkenly bent over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark....”
-Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), Anne Sexton
~
“Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?”
-Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women, Anne Sexton
~
“We talked of death, and this was life to us.”
-describing friendship with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton
~
“Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”
-Elegy In The Classroom, Anne Sexton
~
“Cold slicing the windowpane
like a razor blade
for God, it seems,
has turned his backside to us,
giving us the dark negative,
the death wing....”
-God's Backside, Anne Sexton
~
“I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.”
-Her Kind, Anne Sexton
~
“I am alone here in my own mind.
There is no map
and there is no road.”
-January 24th, Anne Sexton
~
“My safe, safe psychosis is broken.
It was hard.
It was made of stone.
It covered my face like a mask.
But it has cracked.”
-Letters to Dr. Y...., Anne Sexton
~
“Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.”
-Live, Anne Sexton
~
“This is my death...and it will profit me to understand it.”
-Making a Living, Anne Sexton
~
“My death from the wrists,
two name tags,
blood worn like a corsage
to bloom
one on the left and one on the right.”
-Menstruation At 40, Anne Sexton
~
“But I would cry,
rooted into the wall that
was once my mother,
if I could remember how
and if I had the tears.”
-Self In 1958, Anne Sexton
~
“What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall
upon some shellacked and grinning person,
eyes that open, blue, steel, and close.
Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?”
-Self In 1958, Anne Sexton
~
“I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.”
-Sylvia's Death, Anne Sexton
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