Since I’m still in shock over the whole ‘1 in 4 don’t read’ thing, I figure today’s post will concentrate on some of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite authors/poets - Sylvia Plath. I was preteen the first time I read The Bell Jar, and as soon as I finished I immediately started it again. From that day forward it’s never been far from my thoughts.

When I try to decipher why I like the people I do… what draws me to them, keeps me loyal, that sort of thing… the only common denominator I find is what I like to refer to as the ‘hepburn effect’- a deep confidence and (often) outspokenness that only comes from honest self-appraisal. Because, hey, lie to the rest of the world… we all do that, nothing new there… but never yourself. Own your faults. You don’t have to be proud of them, (i’d worry if you were) but if anyone’s going to understand you- it had better be you. And while you may not love (or even like) yourself, you’d damn well need to find a way to accept who and what you are.

Sylvia had that down in spades. She was neurotic as hell- needy, bitchy, overly reliant on others, but she owned it. Too bad in the end it didn’t save her. Still, she died knowing who she was. Wow, dark. Anyway, to this day when I come across these quotes, it’s like she was speaking for/to me. I would love to have met Sylvia Plath, and I’d like to think she might’ve liked me too.

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- 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.

- Can a selfish, egocentric, jealous, and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

- If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

- Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

- Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it’s because we’re dangerously close to wanting nothing.

- I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

- I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.

- If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

- To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

- I talk to God but the sky is empty.

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And for those of us with ‘daddy’ issues:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

On this day..

• In other news. - 2007
• Brief intermission. - 2006