Quotes By Letter: S

“Thief --
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long.”

-Sylvia's Death, Anne Sexton

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“The pills are a mother, but better,
every color and as good as sour balls.
I'm on a diet from death.”

-The Addict, Anne Sexton

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“Yes
I try
to kill myself in small amounts,
an innocuous occupation.
Actually I'm hung up on it.”

-The Addict, Anne Sexton

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“Part way back from Bedlam
I came to my mother's house in Gloucester,
Massachusetts. And this is how I came
to catch at her; and this is how I lost her.
I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.
And she never could.”

-The Double Image, Anne Sexton

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“And oh they bring to mind the grave,
so humble, so willing to be beat upon
with its awful lettering and
the body lying underneath
without an umbrella.”

-The Fury of Rain Storms, Anne Sexton

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“But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build”

-Wanting To Die, Anne Sexton

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“she is his selection, part time.
you know the story too! look,
when it is over he places her,
like a phone, back on the hook.”

-You All Know the Story of the Other Woman, Anne Sexton

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“...Ursula begins penciling in her own face, emphasizing and even exaggerating those features of which she was ashamed as a teenager and of which she now makes a point of being proud: the ridge on which her eyebrows are set, her muscular jawline, the elongated slope between her nose and her upper lip. It's important to have these features, she thinks, for the same reason it's important to live in a cramped apartment with a lumpy futon. With a face like this, in a place like that, she's never in danger of feeling glamorous. She can sit on a pile of moldy pillows on the floor of her windowless living room, so dark the ceiling lamp needs to be on in the middle of the day, and she can pull up the hem of her nightshirt, as she did this afternoon, and look down at her thighs and not feel sexy, not feel attractive at all, feel quite unattractive, in fact, whereas if she were on a white couch in a spacious room with oversized windows and sunlight warming her thighs, who knows? She might look at those legs and think of those legs' being looked at and think of herself as being sexy and even glamorous, too. Because glamour is a matter of context. And white, empty space, as she learned from her pile of out-of-date library books, is the number-one glamour cue in advertisements. Anything placed on a white, empty background is instantly glamorized, be it a perfume bottle, a watch, a hair-care product, an upscale toothpaste, or a woman's body. This was what Ivy wanted, white space, nothing but white and space. Ursula marveled at all that white space when she went to break the lease on her sister's apartment, too white and spacious for Ursula herself to afford. A white couch, a bed with white sheets, a small white table and white chairs, symmetrically placed amid four white walls: Ivy aspired to the absolute zero of glamour. Her ideal was to have no context at all, only weightlessly to crowd-surf on an endless sea of strangers who would hold, fondle, and pass along every facet of her glamorous existence. A kind of utterly passive immortality.”

-The Savage Girl, Alex Shaker

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“Society is no comfort, to one not sociable.”

-Cymbeline, William Shakespeare

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“And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“The devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape.”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“This above all; to thine own self be true.”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 't is 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 heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,--'t is 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 13 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.”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

-Hamlet, William Shakespeare

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“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

-Macbeth, William Shakespeare

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“Stars, hid your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires....”

-Macbeth, William Shakespeare

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“Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.”

-Measure For Measure, William Shakespeare

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“Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.”

-Romeo And Juliet, William Shakespeare

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“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs:
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers' tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.”

-Romeo And Juliet, William Shakespeare

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“Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.”

-Sonnet 57, William Shakespeare

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“My grief lies onward and my joy behind.”

-Sonnet l, William Shakespeare

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“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

-Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare

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