Quotation
"'The important thing is to love this world; if a man has loved so much as a grapefruit and found it beautiful, God will save him.'" -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

Quotation
"The idea of perfect happiness and adjustment was exploded in Brave New World; what I am fighting for is the strength to claim the 'right to be unhappy' together with the joy of creative affirmation…" -Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

Quotation
"'Hate oughtn't to be stronger than love — but her hate was. And my hate for her is — I hate her — I hate her — I hate her.'" -Agatha Christie, Murder In Retrospect

Quotation
Puck: If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearnéd luck
Now to scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends. -William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Painting
Untitled

*Available for purchase on Etsy.

Quotation
"This morning, as they drove out to the nursing home, she realized that her life was becoming unbearable. Every morning she would play games with herself, just to get her through the day. Like telling herself that today something wonderful was going to happen…that the next time the phone would ring, it would be good news that would change her life…or that she was going to get a surprise in the mail. But it was never anything but junk mail, a wrong number, a neighbor wanting something.
The quiet hysteria and awful despair had started when she finally began to realize that nothing was ever going to change, that nobody would be coming for her to take her away. She began to feel as if she were at the bottom of a well, screaming, no one to hear.
Lately, it had been and endless procession of long, black nights and gray mornings, when her sense of failure swept over her like a five-hundred-pound wave; and she was scared. But it wasn't death that she feared. She had looked down into that black pit of death and had wanted to jump in, once too often. As a matter of fact, the thought began to appeal to her more and more.
She eve knew how she would kill herself. It would be with a silver bullet. As round and as smooth as an ice-cold blue martini. She would place the gun in the freezer for a few hours before she did it, so it would feel frosty and cold against her head. She could almost feel the ice-cold bullet shooting through her hot, troubled brain, freezing the pain for good. The sound of the gun blast would be the last sound she would ever hear. And then…nothing. Maybe just the silent sound that bird might hear, flying in the clean, cool air, high above the earth. The sweet, pure air of freedom.
No, it wasn't death she was afraid of. It was this life of hers that was beginning to remind her of that gray intensive care waiting room." -Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Quotations
"'"I've come home in love with loneliness…"'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

"'…or just there are hours when sheer loneliness wrings the stamina out of me.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'Oh, I am — I am — lonely — with the loneliness of unshared thought.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"A terrible, abysmal loneliness engulfed Marigold." -L.M. Montgomery, Magic for Marigold

Random Musing
He would have been twenty-one today. Fittingly, his last song was titled "21."

Quotation
"'I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night,' groaned Phil." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

Random Musing
This is the only quote I have that is at all related to test-related stress. I know it doesn't exactly seem exam related, but I've read the book enough times to know the context. So you'll just have to trust me that it fits.

I don't personally have exams right now since I'm all gradumacated and everything, but I wish the rest of you good luck. Finals will be over very soon and then you can lie around and be lazy for a few weeks. Twill be loverly I'm sure. Happy studying!

Quotation
"…So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!…" -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"

Quotations
"But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her, the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition.  It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed.  There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable." -Kate Chopin, The Awakening

"In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, she awoke — not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow." -George Eliot, Middlemarch

"…This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor–then the letting go—" -Emily Dickinson, "After great pain, a formal feeling comes"

Quotation
"There's more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence is it?" -Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Translated by Natasha Wimmer)

Quotation
"'Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?'" -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Quotations
"'It's rather hard to decide just when people are grown up,' laughed Anne.
'That's a true word, dearie. Some are grown up when they're born, and others ain't grown up when they're eighty, believe me. That same Mrs. Roderick I was speaking of never grew up. She was as foolish when she was hundred as when she was ten.'
'Perhaps that was why she lived so long,' suggested Anne." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

"'I used to dance and sing…on the shore, where nobody heard me,' said Myra Murray.
'Ah, but you've grown wiser since then,' said Agatha.
'No-o-o, foolisher,' said Myra Murray slowly. 'Too foolish now to dance along the shore.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside

"'How many will be brave enough to return when they feel it?' he whispered, his gleaming red eyes fixed upon the stars. 'And how many will be foolish enough to stay away?'" -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

"'…Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth…'" -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Touchstone:The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what
wise men do foolishly. -William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Desdemona: …Good faith, how foolish are our minds! -William Shakespeare, Othello

Quotation
"But there was happiness elsewhere which no description can reach." -Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Quotations
"Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

"'I feel as if something has been torn suddenly out of my life and left a terrible hole. I feel as if I couldn't be I — as if I must have changed into somebody else and couldn't get used to it. It gives me a horrible lonely, dazed, helpless feeling. It's good to see you again — it seems as if you were a sort of anchor for my drifting soul.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne's House of Dreams

"The wind had such a lonely sound tonight. It was reproaching her. It was saying, 'Silly…silly…silly,' over and over again." -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside

"If she had taken time to think she might have been very lonely." -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'Night is beautiful when you are happy — comforting when you are in grief — terrible when you are lonely and unhappy. And to-night I have been horribly lonely. Misery overwhelmed me.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'I'm not lonely — I have my work and my books and the hope of spring…'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

"'Oh, I am — I am — lonely — with the loneliness of unshared thought.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest

Quotation
"'Thanksgiving was last week. There was no school and we had a great dinner. I et mince pie and rost turkey and frut cake and donuts and cheese and jam and choklut cake. Marilla said I'd die but I dident. Dora had earake after it, only it wasent in her ears it was in her stummick. I dident have earake anywhere.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

Quotation
"No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them." -David Nicholls, One Day

Quotation
"…Love is not full of pity, as men say,
But deaf and cruel, where he means to prey…." -Christopher Marlowe, "Hero and Leander"

Quotations
"'Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars

"'Be merciful to the failures, Emily. Satirise wickedness if you must — but pity weakness.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs

"'It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked.'" -L.M. Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill

"'I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.  Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.'" -Jane Austen, Emma

"'He was one of those creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness. Miserable devils that have no business to live at all.'" -Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Sharer"

"'People aren't either wicked or noble,' the hook-handed man said. 'They're like chef salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.'" -Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

"'I'm afraid that's the wicked way of the world,' Dewey said, with a shake of his head. 'Everything's covered in smoke and mirrors…'" -Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

"He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said." -Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Quotation
"The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that happy things are tainted with sadness, the way smoke leaves its ashen colors and scents on everything it touches. And you may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down." -Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto