...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
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.
Interpretation
Life is filled with desires and limitations; we can't experience everything we wish to.
In this quote, Sylvia Plath expresses a profound yearning to explore the entirety of human experience, including the desire to read, learn, and live various lives. However, she recognizes the inherent limitations that prevent us from doing so, highlighting the bittersweet nature of human existence, where our aspirations often exceed our capabilities, leading to a sense of longing and confinement.
In practice
During a speech about pursuing dreams despite life's constraints.
...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.
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.
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.
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?
I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
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.
So many words get lost. They leave the mouthand lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days you can hear their chorus rushing past.
But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.
There are moments that you suffer a lot, moments you won't photograph. There are some people you like better than others. But you give, you receive, you cherish, you are there. When you are really there, you know when you see the picture later what you are seeing.
After my training wheels, my first real bike was a Schwinn, and my first time out, I rode down a hill, didn’t know how to stop, and ran right into a tree. So, that was a nice experience ... like realizing, oh, there are brakes!
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time
If you want the beautiful moments to shine, you have to contrast that with dark and gruesome moments. That's the way life is.
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