...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 liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
Interpretation
The quote reflects an intense curiosity about human experiences and the complexities of life.
Sylvia Plath's quote captures the essence of human curiosity and the fascination with intense or difficult situations. By expressing a desire to observe critical moments, she highlights a deeper understanding of life that can shape one's perspective and memories. This desire to witness the raw reality of human existence speaks to our innate longing to comprehend the world, despite its often troubling nature.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of curiosity in personal growth.
...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.
Sometimes we talked about the nature of the human soul and about the Cosmic Unity of souls that I had believed in so firmly when I was 15 years old. My mother did not like the phrase Cosmic Unity. It was too pretentious. She preferred to call it a world soul.
The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.
The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.