Give us your favorite Sylvia Plath quote (line from her writing)

So many good ones. I do relate to this especially: “Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”

I am convinced that Sylvia Plath is at least part Vogon.

Here is a poem she wrote for her Mother:

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,
You house your unnerving head—God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of
departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.

In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta

Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us.

Now, isn’t that nice?

@filmfann She hated her parents, so what do you expect?

Admonition

If you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You’ll cut the chord
Articulating song.

If you flay a beast
To marvel at the mane
You’ll wreck the rest
From which the fur began.

If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.

Here is mine:

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

@marinelife I love that one—I also like this one:
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

Way too many to even try to choose, but today, I pick this one.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
Sylvia Plath

(what can I say… I make soap and bath products. I think she’s spot-on)

but really, I think personally, this one is it:

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”
From ‘The Munich Mannequins’