Literary Birthday – 27 October – Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932 and died on 11 February 1963.

Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

Sylvia Plath Quotes

1. Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.
2. Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
3. 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.
4. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
5. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
6. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatise 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.
7. The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.
8. I like people too much or not at all.
9. Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
10. Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?
11. 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.
12. What did my arms do before they held you?
13. How we need another soul to cling to.
14. Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
15. You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She became one of the leading figures of confessional poetry, writing openly about identity, mental anguish, relationships, and death. Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, was published shortly before her death and explores a young woman’s struggle with depression and a sense of alienation. Her poetry is known for its intense imagery and personal themes, and her work became influential during the women’s movement of the 1960s. Plath married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they had two children. She died by suicide in 1963, aged 30. Her literary reputation continued to grow after her death. In 1982, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously for The Collected Poems.

Source for photograph: Giovanni Giovannetti/Grazia Neri, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sylvia_Plath.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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