Mad Girl's Love Song Quotes

“From the beginning of her development, Sylvia—or Sivvy, as her family called her—came to associate words as a substitute for love”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“The woman who defined herself through her writing had become an empty page.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“If too much has been made of the symptoms of Plath’s mental illness, so too little attention has been paid to its possible causes. Sylvia Plath was an angry young woman born in a country and at a time that only exacerbated and intensified her fury.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“Sylvia Plath is an example of the egotistical sublime: her subject is herself, her predicament, her violent Romantic emotions,” wrote the poet Craig Raine.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“Why couldn’t she enjoy the present moment, she asked herself, without destroying it through overanalysis? What did she want? Everything”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“Janet Salter remembers that “if we were ever in a situation where we didn’t want people to know we were referring to ourselves, we would use biblical names—I would call myself Ruth, and Sylvia liked to use Esther,” the Jewish queen who saved her people from annihilation and the name she would give to the heroine of The Bell Jar.10”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“Writing, she said was not only her favorite hobby, it was also a way in which she could escape into another world—the world of fantasy.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“The challenge of being an adult, she wrote, is to try and accept the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of tragedy and loss. It”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“She wrote that she must stop herself from identifying too closely with the seasons, “because this English winter will be the death of me.” Why”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“She acknowledged that she was in the habit of creating a fantasy image of her boyfriends and told herself that she must not transform Myron into an accumulation of her own projected desires. She”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“It was almost as if Aurelia absorbed her daughter’s misery through some sort of invisible placenta. Surely”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“At the end of the entry, she wrote, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.”93”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“she lived by extremes: people were either gods or devils, and experiences were cast either in the light of romantic ecstasy or shadowed by doubt and negativity.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“When you have experienced a full, complete love, and the searing that accompanies its break-up, then you will understand,” he wrote. “Then, too, I think, you will be a great writer. Now, you have the eyes and ears and soul of a great writer. Then, you will have the heart of one.”88”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“Whenever she felt discouraged or bored with her writing, she said she would remember Prouty’s words, “Take life!”79”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“She always felt a compulsion to wrench chunks of experience out of her life and write them down on paper, she said. Sylvia”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“I like the idea, which I think is prevalent amongst us, that four years at Smith College are not so much a preparation for a larger life as they are in themselves a larger life here and now,” said Chase, who during the course of her career wrote more than thirty books,”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“She was addicted to achievement in the same way an alcoholic is hooked on booze; the winning of awards, certificates, and prizes were all concrete markers of her accomplishments, signifiers of attainment that helped boost her self-esteem.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“She would rather live an honest life, even one that would prove to be more disturbing and distressing, she said. In”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“Seeing her own name gave her a more solid sense of existence, and the sight would prove to be addictive; Sylvia would spend the rest of her life pursuing the elusive thrill of the byline.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted

“From the beginning of her development, Sylvia—or Sivvy, as her family called her—came to associate words as a substitute for love.”
― Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted