...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia PlathRead
That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the complex relationship with a mother and the bittersweet nature of anticipatory grief.
In this quote, Sylvia Plath poignantly expresses a dark humor and acceptance of death through the simple act of receiving roses from her mother. The line speaks to the inevitability of loss and the often complicated emotions surrounding familial love, as the speaker suggests saving the flowers for a future funeral, thus intertwining beauty with sorrow and indicating a deeper existential reflection on life and death.
Themes
MotherRosesFuneralGriefLossFamilyBittersweetExistence
In practice
Example use cases
In a eulogy, reflecting on the love between family members.
More from Sylvia Plath
All quotes βThe hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.
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It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
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You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
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I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
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It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual.
Sylvia PlathRead
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