Fever 103 Quotes

I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962 ~ Sylvia Plath

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. ~ Sylvia Plath

Clear. Cold. Empty. Like how I feel right now. Love is strange. One minute you're jungle fever. The next you're Artic winter. ~ Ellen Hopkins

Sometimes my dreams feel so real it's hard to believe they're just the subconscious's stroll across a whimsical map that has no true north. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Fevers are a mixed blessing. They damage good tissues in the body, and some runaway fevers end up killing people. Also, for as long as people have had fevers, they've used herbal medicines (including ones containing the active ingredient in aspirin) to relieve them. But it's also possible that ancients knew something we don't: that helping along a fever may actually be beneficial. ~ John Durant

There's no "magic secret"; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day - bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two. ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

It is a glorious fever, desire to know. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams ... ~ M.F.K. Fisher

Youth is a perpetual intoxication; it is a fever of the mind. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process. ~ Stendhal

A man who finds peace in the fume of his work is a man who knows himself and, therefore, knows what he must do. What is it that I would sacrifice myself to achieve? What is it that fills my lonely days and dowdy nights? What work consoles the soul? What action allows the brain to work at a fever, burn like an uncontrollable wildfire? What occupation, craft, or deed can I undertake that will embody a desire to share with other people my intellectual and emotional being? How does one express their worldly aspirations and spiritual yearnings? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight. ~ Anais Nin

There isn't a single plant on earth that doesn't carry within it the ability to heal something. For example, the bark from the cinchona tree heals malaria, turkey tail mushrooms (Coriolus versicolor) can shrink tumors, and even those little yellow dandelions that shoot up in every nook and cranny of your lawn can cool down a fever and help detoxify the blood. ~ Mindi K. Counts

The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure. ~ Frank Harris

And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too. But he isn't. He knows he isn't, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn't crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn't him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn't want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he'd always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved. But ~ William Gibson

Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. ~ Adrienne Rich

I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks. ~ Alan Alda

Had he stood outside my door as I'd stood outside his, fists at his sides, lips drawn back? Did it have him as bad as it had me? Was it eating at him, gnawing at him with the same sharp vicious little teeth that wouldn't let me sleep?
Yes, it was. I could see the rage of insatiable uninvited lust in every line of that dark, stoic face that had once been too subtly etched for me to read. I wasn't the only one lying awake at night, fevered with memories, tossing, turning, soaking my sheets, burning up
not for Fae sex, but him, damn it all to hell, him. ~ Karen Marie Moning

During times of physical separation, when touching and caressing is impossible, a deep, longing, almost a hunger, for the beloved can set in. We are used to thinking of this longing as only psychological, but it's actually physical. The brain is virtually in a drug-withdrawal state. During a separation, motivation for reunion can reach a fever pitch in the brain. Activities such as caressing, kissing, gazing, hugging, and orgasm can replenish the chemical bond of love and trust in the brain. The oxytocin-dopamine rush once again suppresses anxiety and skepticism and reinforces the love circuits in the brain. From an experiment we also know that oxytocin is naturally released in the brain after a twenty-second hug from a partner- sealing the bond between huggers and triggering the brain's trust circuits. ~ Louann Brizendine

California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men's passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccinations. But the Mohammaden religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above all the peoples of all other creeds, to this form of madness. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Love

You asked if love makes one happy.
His promise's yes, be it for a day.
Ah, who wouldn't want to live one day for love
Then die? For life does live in love.

As lover full of gentleness and fear,
With his fires I painted his suffering,
On his portrait I shed so many tears
That his image became much less charming.

If smile, that unexpected gleam,
Broke out sometimes amidst my tears,
It was love, unarmed, it was him,
And heaven with him disappears.

Deprived of love, the heart's icy.
Yet he burns all, and poisons all.
He sure knows how to rend a soul.
Ask him if he makes one happy!

You'll know, whatever may occur,
That love will win by force or grace;
And in the slow-healing fever he made
You will suffer and make others suffer.

Once found, his absence is torture,
And when he's back, one shakes every hour.
Often it's death that lives in love.
And yet, love does make one happy. ~ Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

You speak of love? Love is a sickness that causes men and women to do stupid things, the sorts of things that leave them sad and broken when the fever passes. ~ Danielle Teller

God, you have a beautiful laugh, and your smile. Jesus, it knocks the breath out of me."
"You can't talk to me like that, nobody says things like that to a woman he just met. It's insane."
"I just did. And I plan to keep saying them until you believe every word. ~ Maya Banks

Ingo was a fever, and so far she hadn't found the antidote. ~ Margaret Way

Britain's Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens had lately reclassified herpes B into biohazard level 4, placing it in the elite company of Ebola, Marburg, and the virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. National ~ David Quammen

Let's walk to the beach
Let's cast the net in the water
And catch freshness from water

Let's pick up a pebble from the ground
Feel the weight of existence

Let's not abuse moonshine if we suffer from fever
(Occasionally I have observed the moon descending during fever
And reaching the hand of the roof of heaven
I have noticed the goldfinch singing better
Sometimes the wound beneath my foot
Has taught the ups and downs of earth
Sometimes in my sickbed the dimension of the rose has multiplied
And the diameter of orange has increased, the radius of lantern too) ~ Sohrab Sepehri

Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister's eyes. Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black. After that he remembered nothing. ~ George R R Martin

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers ... every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labour performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child - every solitary one was a Democrat. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Shame upon him who can look on calmly, and exclaim,
'The foolish girl! she should have waited; she should have
allowed time to wear off the impression; her despair would
have been softened, and she would have found another lover
to comfort her.' One might as well say, 'The fool, to die of a
fever! why did he not wait till his strength was restored, till
his blood became calm? all would then have gone well, and
he would have been alive now. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

That's impossible,' said Fever, Engineerishly. ~ Philip Reeve

Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever; your veins are full of ice water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance. ~ Emily Bronte

How beautiful are these bangles! But if you put them on a man, he will not like it because he has assessed his own worth. One cannot be the 'thermometer (gauge)' as well as the 'fever', both cannot be one. ~ Dada Bhagwan

It's typical of Italian culture that we only start to feel emotional about something when we have the possibility to see it in front of us. By February, Italy will have Olympic fever. ~ Alberto Tomba

Since the most ancient times, all men, and particularly those who endeavored in the practice of medicine, have brought closer together two natural phenomena of capital importance: illness or fever and fermentation. ~ Louis Pasteur

Above 26,000 feet, moreover, the line between appropriate zeal and reckless summit fever becomes grievously thin. Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses. Taske, ~ Jon Krakauer

Playing for money, or adopting the attitude of one who plays for money, lowers the fever. ~ Steven Pressfield

Some can just knock it out and some have to lock themselves in a room and get to a fever pitch of self-loathing before they turn in a first draft ... each writer's process is screwed up in its own way. ~ Warren Leight

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence. ~ William Faulkner

That language is demonstrably stereotypical -- in either the Bible or the modern Mediterranean cultures -- is not the same thing as saying that a language is demonstrably fraudulent -- or that it is language that is not reacting to real trauma. (p. 103) ~ Daniel L. Smith-Christopher

The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this:

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand
And we fell into it
Like a daydream
Or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood ~ Efrim Menuck

When the fever is gone, you forget about it. The same should be true of everything else. ~ Marty Rubin

He moved into the moonlight. That was no accident. He wanted me to see his eyes burning with fever, his skin flushed, hair sweat soaked. He wanted me to say, "Oh, you're Changing," leap out of bed, and insist on going outside with him, help him through it, a I had the last two times.
I looked at him and I lay back down.
He stepped froward. "Chloe.."
"What?"
"It's ... It's starting again."
"I see that."
I sat up, swung my legs out of bed, and stood. He breathed a sigh of relief. I walked to the window.
"Head down that path about thirty feet, and you'll find a clearing to the left. That should be a good place."
A spark of panic ignited in his eyes. After how he'd treated me today, I should have said "good." But i didn't. Couldn't. It took everything I had to just crawl back into bed. ~ Kelley Armstrong

How much of my fever-induced dream was real? I felt safe assuming that my time as a bee was fiction, as well as a few mythological animals that I swear I'd seen. Then I'd lived on the sun with aliens. ~ Cora Carmack

If seasons diseases be, consider human's too, his fate same it's true
Rudest time steels, and murders through fever, pain, amid all in woe.
Swelling then cold, yet numb, in young and old, fearing wildest swell,
See it turns the sweetest singers throats, and morrow, a garland will.

On 'Seasons A Dirge'-A Dirge
For A Diseased Friend Who Died Of Fever In 2013 ~ Nithin Purple

Well, it was probably the fever. You were burning up."
My eyes snapped back to his. "You touched me?"
"Yes, I touched you…and you weren't wearing a lot of clothes." The smug stretch of his lips spread. "And you were soaked …in a white T-shirt. Nice look. Very nice."
Heat crept over my cheeks. "The lake…it wasn't a dream?" Daemon shook his head.
"Oh my God, so I did go swimming in the lake?"
He pushed off the desk and took one step forward, which put him in the same breathing space as me… if he actually needed to breathe. "You did. Not something I expected to see on Monday night, but I'm not complaining. I saw a lot."
"Shut up," I hissed.
"Don't be embarrassed." He reached out, tugging on the sleeve of my cardigan. I smacked his hand away. "It's not like I haven't seen the upper part before, and I didn't get a real good look down - "
I came off the desk swinging. My knuckles only brushed his face before he caught my hand. Wowzer, he was fast. Daemon pulled me up against his chest and lowered his head, eyes snapping with restrained anger. "Don't hit, kitten. It's not nice. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Cabin Fever was murder. There was a lot of psychological stress, like not knowing if we were going to finish the movie. The day we arrived to start rehearsals, our main investors pulled out. ~ Rider Strong

I got dressed to begin another day. Over and over, we begin again. (Kitchen, 103) ~ Banana Yoshimoto

If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong. ~ Sebastian Junger

I'm liberated and lost.
I feel. I shiver with fever. I'm I. ~ Fernando Pessoa