...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
Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is a blend of joyful experiences and challenging self-reflection.
In this quote, Sylvia Plath encapsulates the essence of life as a mixture of enchanting moments and profound beauty intertwined with periods of self-doubt and questioning. She suggests that our existence is not just about the fairy-tale moments but also includes the struggles that shape our understanding and appreciation of beauty in the world.
Themes
LifeBeautySelf-QuestioningJoyExperience
In practice
Example use cases
In a graduation speech to highlight the duality of life experiences.
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.
Sylvia PlathRead
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.
Sylvia PlathRead
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?
Sylvia PlathRead
I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
Sylvia PlathRead
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
Similar quotes
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
Jack KerouacRead
It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?
Orson Scott CardRead
A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything’s going to be all right. you’ve made it past Dead Man’s Curve and you’re out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not.
Haruki MurakamiRead
I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?
Ernest HemingwayRead
For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
Frank MccourtRead