#plath

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’ ‘No, what?’ I would say. ‘A piece of dust.’ Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#the-bell-jar #imagination

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#plath #life

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#desire #love #need #security #sylvia-plath

I think I am mad sometimes. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#journalism

He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With everything but the will – That can be deformed, just like a limb. Death was more interesting to him. Life could not get his attention. ↗

— Ted Hughes

#life #plath #sheep- #death

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#appear #been #bipolar #describe #ends

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them. ↗

— Joni Mitchell

#augustine #common #i #make #me

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say? ↗

— Toni Morrison

#choice #describe #economy #how #many

Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally. ↗

— Anne Stevenson

#half #her #i #just #knew

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#plath #sylvia #writing #wrong