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Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath QUOTES

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath QUOTES

1 " I need so to love a person-be it girl or boy, friend or enemy. And without being able to, I sort of dry up. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

2 " NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs,” she told her Smith College students in 1958. “BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

3 " Plath was determined to play her part, but, as Stevenson’s speech suggests, the odds were against her. She lived in a shamelessly discriminatory age when it was almost impossible for a woman to get a mortgage, loan, or credit card; when newspapers divided their employment ads between men and women (“Attractive Please!”); the word “pregnant” was banned from network television; and popular magazines encouraged wives to remain quiet because, as one advice columnist put it, “his topics of conversation are more important than yours. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

4 " Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

5 " She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could. She was, in the words of a close friend, “operatic” in her desires, a “Renaissance woman” molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New England stoicism.5 She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeats’s gongs and gyres as Frost’s silences and snow. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

6 " I love the thinginess of things. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

7 " BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

8 " Out in the radish fields, she did not have to impress, outthink, or outperform anyone. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

9 " Because Picasso could no longer imitate, he innovated. Plath does the same in “Daddy,” her surreal poem of rupture. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

10 " Like her Joycean hero Stephen Dedalus, she was filled with “Icarian lust”: she would seek out her destiny abroad, collect experience for her art, and stay in motion.10 Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized. Plath spread her wings, over and over, at a time when women were not supposed to fly. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

11 " I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect, "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

12 " The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare. "

― , Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath