“I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.”

(XII.2) Del Rey, p. 412
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

On her relation with David A. Stewart, her husband at the time, in "Siobhan Fahey?" The Observer (19 May 1996) http://web.archive.org/20090211192644/www.geocities.com/djohnl_2000/Interviews/1996_May_Observer.html

Variant: We don't even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.
Source: From a letter to William Packard from 1985 (published in Reach for the Sun - the 3rd volume of Bukowski correspondence)
Context: Sex, love, duty, God, family are not to be bargained with against happiness, and we don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Source: Chronicles: Vol. One (2004), p. 115

ἐν ὀλιγίστοις κεῖται τὸ εὐδαιμόνως βιῶσαι
VII, 67
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII

Variant: No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they're pretty, even if they aren't.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 561.

"America 101", speech at the fiftieth anniversary of the Council of Great City Schools (27 October 2006), as quoted in Moyers on Democracy (2008), p. 237
Context: For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. … There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis.