Your Story, My Story Quotes

“We moeten oog in oog staan met onze monsters, de wolven temmen, in de doolhoven van onze ziel de Minotaurus zoeken en doden, want als we dat niet doen, doden ze ons.”
― Connie Palmen, Jij zegt het

“a poet can become fully aware of his poetic self only once he falls in love with a woman in whom the white goddess resides, someone who unites creation and destruction and who will bring triumph and doom into his life.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Het toeval is vaak verstandiger dan onze wil”
― Connie Palmen, Jij zegt het

“Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Friends, like family, want you to remain unchanged, while love has the indecent capacity to transform you, to enrich you with a new take on everything you were once familiar with. The more she fell into disfavor with everyone, the more dogged my impulse to protect her from a hostile world,”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Why do so few people understand that the disdain of others, their condemnation of the one you love, in fact strengthens your love? I could read the dismay at my choice in the eyes of everyone around me.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Geen paradijs zonder slang.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Alles wat we deelden – onze dromen en ideeën, onze lichamen, ons werk – heeft me blind gemaakt voor wat we niet deelden.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Het was wreed, het deed pijn. Het was echt.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Coincidence is often more prudent than our own will.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I was as relieved and happy as she, but it ate away at me that all those lies—misleading friends and family, twisting and turning, the panic—had been unnecessary, caused by a chimera. I had allowed myself to be swept along by her specters of punishment, condemnation, and excommunication, and she—however temporarily—had possessed the power to make me someone I was not and never wanted to be, a liar, a coward, rather than a man who stands up for himself regardless of the cost.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“once there she rushed onto the platform full of anxious suspicions and behold, there I was, alive and well, not wiped off the face of the earth, and because my train had been delayed—a twist of fate—we arrived on the platform at exactly the same time; it was an omen, the gods were watching over us and we were meant for one another, for all eternity. I looked into that tearful face and, grinning, experienced the sensation of being an outright miracle.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I hadn’t seen her for thirteen days. It felt like an eternity.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“she accompanied me in wonder, embraced me every ten paces, and her happiness made me proud and rich in a way I had never felt before, a duplicated man from whose body a woman had been taken who belonged inseparably with him and would never again disappear from his life.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“All of these women saw in her an extension of themselves, the ideal projection of their aborted dreams, or a younger self in another time, when a writing woman would no longer be viewed with suspicion and scorn.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I could have said goodbye then, run from this story, fled from its writer, from the leitmotif of my character, listened to the voice warning me of the inevitable consequences, commanded by the logic of the plot, but instead I was sucked in deeper, attracted by the danger, irresistibly drawn to the siren song.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I loved her as the first among equals, with the same inconsistency with which I loved all the other women after the death of my bride, as a passerby who at any moment—without explanation or apology—could vanish.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“When I stumbled across the line about a suicide killing two, I knew he was right.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Everything that’s denied and repressed, every conflict that’s swept under the carpet and disavowed, in a culture or in an individual’s existence, seeks a way out and ultimately—violent, destructive, diabolically disguised—turns against life.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“No paradise without a snake.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Connie Palmen’s Your Story, My Story is a closely researched fictional account of the relationship between Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I read Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, a play in which he tried to work through Marilyn Monroe’s suicide. When I stumbled across the line about a suicide killing two, I knew he was right.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“My wife wrote on stolidly, so she didn’t see what happened, how the Gypsy pointed a purply-black finger like a gun barrel at her right temple and shot a curse like a bullet: “Vous crèverez bientôt.” You will soon be dead.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“Freud was one of our standard references, and I couldn’t know for sure how he would have reacted to Dr. Beuscher’s remark, but I suspected that giving my wife permission to despise her mother would throw open the floodgates of a devastating self-hate. No daughter loathes her mother without hating herself.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“All great literature—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, the Bible—is about the struggle with the forces of evil, against something that—inside us and out—is hell-bent on our destruction, the death of the body or the soul.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“until I suddenly saw myself from his perspective, a poet whose throat was clamped shut by his disgust at the stainless-steel world of abundance and falseness.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I had to resist the feeling that her mercantile spirit was corrupting the purity of my love for poetry.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“I, the coarse Yorkshireman, had chosen this exalted woman above all others, given my heart to a gushy, excessive creature, the prototype of pretense and artificiality, fanatical, exaggerated in all things.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“that she was more androgynous than you might have guessed from the prim and proper girl with the ponytail. She wanted someone to test her strength against, she wanted to fight, and for that she sought out the biggest, strongest man she could find. Me.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story

“The more dangerous the real self, the more refined the masks. The more caustic the poison we would like to spew over others—to paralyze them, to kill them—the sweeter the nectar with which we lure them toward us, to be near us, to love us.”
― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story