Red Comet Quotes

“NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs,” she told her Smith College students in 1958. “BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could. She was, in the words of a close friend, “operatic” in her desires, a “Renaissance woman” molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New England stoicism.5 She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeats’s gongs and gyres as Frost’s silences and snow.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Plath was determined to play her part, but, as Stevenson’s speech suggests, the odds were against her. She lived in a shamelessly discriminatory age when it was almost impossible for a woman to get a mortgage, loan, or credit card; when newspapers divided their employment ads between men and women (“Attractive Please!”); the word “pregnant” was banned from network television; and popular magazines encouraged wives to remain quiet because, as one advice columnist put it, “his topics of conversation are more important than yours.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“She was, [Wilfrid Riley] recalled, "a very clever person, but you couldn't be at ease with her some way. She wasn't with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you . . . You couldn't sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people." It wasn't pride, he thought, that made her this way. "Shyness came into it. She couldn't lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don't think she intended to be.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields...and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“and the feeling that nothing else but writing and thinking is done there, no sleeping, eating or mundane stuff.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Prince Charles would one day create a shrine at Highgrove.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“disconsolate. Letters home alighted on a familiar theme. “I miss the American snow, which at least makes a new clean exciting season out of winter, instead of this 6 months cooping-up of damp & rain & blackness we get here. Like the 6 months Persephone had to spend with Pluto.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Her letters from Devon are full of reassurances and homely asides that seem calculated to distract her mother from her life’s radical decisions. “How I envy girls whose mothers can just drop in on them,” she wrote Aurelia in early February.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“she had “specially saved” them out of her weekly draft sheets.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Plath was in the middle of writing a classic American novel, yet she was expected to drop everything to be a hostess and maid.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Baskin remembered her “glacial, punitive fury”; she refused to speak to him for twenty-four hours.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Her rising stock meant that she may have no longer felt obligated to play the perfect hostess to Hughes’s friends.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Jar: America, symbolized by Eisenhower, is an oppressive patriarchy in thrall to the Cold War’s military-industrial complex.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Fitting in was still a challenge, Suzette said, in England. “When she wanted to be accepted she went into this gushing mode….She didn’t quite know how to fit into the English village.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Ted felt guilty enough about what he did that he later unburdened himself to someone, probably Olwyn. According to Sylvia’s September 1962 letter to Dr. Beuscher, nothing like it ever happened again.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Courting violence, as Plath’s early drafts of Falcon Yard show, was something of an aesthetic stance, and part of the couple’s shared mythology.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Her passing, almost blasé reference to this incident in her letter to Dr. Beuscher suggests that she probably did not think of herself as a victim at a time when slapping a “hysterical” woman was culturally sanctioned, even glamorized in Hollywood films.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“was “relatively impervious” to the “innumerable little umbilical cords” that tied her to “icebox, phone, doorbell, baby and so on.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“I’d never be writing as I am and as much as I am without Ted’s understanding and cooperation,” she was expressing gratitude for what was in 1961—six years before abortion was legalized in Britain—a progressive marriage. Plath declined to add that Hughes probably wouldn’t be writing “as much” without her “cooperation,” for she brought a professional know-how to the creative marriage.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“They were “writing for ten years” before they had ever heard of each other: the “toughness and knottiness that we both admire is something again we’ve always admired and perhaps that’s why we met in the first place.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Plath averred that she was “much more distractable” and needed to separate from Hughes, who could write anywhere.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“while Plath, with her mid-Atlantic accent, sounded like Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“What she was interested in and what she talked about quite a lot was the question of putting yourself right into the poem. And the problem of aestheticizing it, of transcending the material, of getting beyond the personal.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Rich later admitted, “What I wanted to tell her was ‘Don’t try,’ because I was in such despondency…I couldn’t foresee a future different from the past two years of raising children and being almost continuously angry.”113”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“where Sylvia bought Painted Caravan, a book on tarot, which would inform her poem “The Hanging Man.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“She told him the Poetry acceptance was “the consecration of my new writing, which, properly, began with you and ‘Pursuit.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath