...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
It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the profound impact of witnessing death and how such experiences can linger in one's mind.
In this quote, Sylvia Plath illustrates the haunting memory of seeing a cadaver and how that event permeates her everyday life, symbolizing the struggle with mortality and the intersection of life and death. The visceral imagery captures the weight of this experience, emphasizing how deeply such confrontations with death can affect an individual’s psyche, invoking feelings of unease and a sense of burdening memory that can disrupt normalcy.
Themes
DeathMemoryMortalityExistentialismTrauma
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about how trauma shapes our memories and daily lives.
More from Sylvia Plath
All quotes →The 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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