Heather Clark > 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

“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 am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,”
― 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

“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

“He famously—and condescendingly—told the class that they should aspire to be superlative mothers and housewives and that their main role was to support their husbands.”
― 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

“I don’t know how many other people experienced writers’ block after that, but I certainly decided I was never going to be a fiction writer because I didn’t want to be depressed….”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Plath found in Alvarez’s war against gentility a kind of proto-feminism, for women had the most to gain—and the most to lose—by shedding decorum.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“I would have no more interrupted nights. And pity tires the heart. For which thoughts I was to endure long remorse.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“he’d bash my head in.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“I never found anyone so unspontaneous so consistently, especially in one so young….She was simply all façade, too polite, too well brought up and well disciplined.”57 Sylvia, an intimidated subordinate, could hardly have behaved otherwise.”
― 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

“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

“Yet Sylvia told others she was "daring to live the way most people dream of living when they are fifty: to sacrifice all for our ideal of a good life, not other people's cars & securities & 10 year leases.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“As in the summer of 1953, depression’s “cures” likely made her depression worse.”
― 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

“A toast, lady, from this humble soul, to what I seriously think may be one of the great creative geniuses of our generation.”124 He was not wrong.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“security, I resort not to the church, but to the earth. The impersonal world of sun, rocks, sea and sky gives me a strange courage.” For her, the vital world was earthly and present: “the universe is non-moral,”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Sylvia was “referring to the madhouse” and shock treatment, but also to “her madness, her loss of self, her inability to do anything. Because that’s what you are. You sit there and you can’t do anything.” Sylvia told Ellie, “When you’re crazy, that’s all you ever are.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Everyone laughed, and Sylvia said, “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (Laurie did not recognize the quotation from Eliot’s “Prufrock.”)”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Plath told friends she did not want to raise two children on her own as her widowed mother had. She was appalled that, for all her efforts to live a different kind of life, she had ended up in the very same situation as Aurelia, but worse—rejected, unemployed, far away from friends and family.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Because Picasso could no longer imitate, he innovated. Plath does the same in “Daddy,” her surreal poem of rupture.”
― 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

“I encountered two things for the first time in my first few weeks in Cambridge: anti-feminism and anti-Semitism. Both were a real shock. I don’t mean that they were everywhere but they certainly existed, and Sylvia must have found herself brought up against them too.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“The play stands as a bracing antidote to a subject that is still routinely sanitized and sentimentalized”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Now all her blithe talk about “Books & Babies & Beef stews” seemed terribly naive as she saw her future as a series of “domestic chores” that had, throughout history, prevented all but the wealthiest women from fulfilling their creative potential.98 She resented having “3 jobs—writing, cooking & housekeeping” and vowed to “have children only after I have a poetry book & a novel published, so my children fit into my work routine & don’t overthrow mine with theirs.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“In what was probably her last poem, Plath drew on Shakespeare, Greek myth, Graves, de Chirico, Yeats, Teasdale, Lawrence, and Hughes to create art that was utterly new and strange—an alternate poetic tradition for women in the wake of her personal male “desertions” and betrayals. It was as if Plath had finally decided that maternity and poetry, womanhood and ambition, could not be reconciled.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath