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Kindle Notes & Highlights
In your voice, my words came off strained, each choice I’d made so obvious and purposeful it lost any organic urgency.
This is exactly what it feels like when someone reads your writing aloud.
Don’t throw in metaphors before we even know what the poem is about.
The line between insanity and art is a verse.
of all human obsessions, the strongest is a desire to habitually rely on memory, when the truth is that memory is full of holes. We fill those holes with ghosts.
Choice meant choosing what to sacrifice.
Poetry moves us, but nobody ever says how it moves us. For some, an absence of poetry leaves them buried alive and running out of oxygen. I worried I was never going to write again.
I fell into moods and rages. The fighting between Francis and me was relentless. By the time he left me, I’d long come to learn the chemistry of grief.
How do you know a lost soul when you see one? You recognize yourself in him.
Miss Plath was a blend of glum self-disapproval and resolute defeatism.
perhaps loss itself is a kind of intervention, a way to confront the fact we hold no power over much in life except over how we respond to powerlessness.
The future she imagined, one in which she was destined for greatness, cracked under the weight of her indecision about which path to follow. The thought of killing herself appeared in the fissures.
No one has ever said empathy is painless. Not even Alfred Binet. Miss Plath’s heart can hold the world in its entirety, but I worry the body that holds that heart is not nearly as strong.
