Andrew Wilson > 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

“[Patricia Highsmith] was an extremely unbalanced person, extremely hostile and misanthropic and totally incapable of any kind of relationship, not just intimate ones. I felt sorry for her, because it wasn't her fault. There was something in her early days or whatever that made her incapable. She drove everybody away and people who really wanted to be friends ended up putting the phone down on her.
It seemed to me as if she had to ape feelings and behaviour, like Ripley. Of course sometimes having no sense of social behaviour can be charming, but in her case it was alarming. I remember once, when she was trying to have a dinner party with people she barely knew, she deliberately leaned towards the candle on the table and set fire to her hair. People didn't know what to do as it was a very hostile act and the smell of singeing and burning filled the room.”
― Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι

“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

“The artistic life is a long and lovely suicide precisely because it involves the negation of self; as Highsmith imagined herself as her characters, so Ripley takes on the personae of others and in doing so metamorphoses himself into a 'living' work of art. A return to the 'real life' after a period of creativity resulted in a fall in spirits, an agony Highsmith felt acutely. She voiced this pain in the novel via Bernard's quotation of an excerpt from Derwatt's notebook: 'There is no depression for the artist except that caused by a return to the self'.”
― Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι

“Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.”
― Andrew Wilson, Patricia Highsmith, ζωή στο σκοτάδι

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“lifeboat arrives alongside the rescue ship Carpathia in the early morning of April 15, 1912. Conditions were harsh—some passengers even perished because of the cold that night—and many survivors remained haunted by their experiences in the lifeboats for the rest of their lives.”
― Andrew Wilson, Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived

“thrown snowballs with Edith Rosenbaum only an hour earlier. In all, there were twenty-eight passengers in this lifeboat; apart from three crew members, all of them were from first class. The lifeboat had a capacity to hold sixty-five.”
― Andrew Wilson, Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived

“According to her goddaughter, Eva adored her newfound status as a Titanic celebrity—not only for the chance to step into the limelight. “One must remember that it also made her some money,” says Dinah Hall.36 Toward the end of her life, however, there developed a rivalry for the title of reigning Titanic queen between Eva and fellow survivor Millvina Dean. Friends say that Eva thought Millvina to be something of an “impostor.” She had only been a nine-week-old baby at the time of the sinking so she had no actual memories of the disaster. Plus, she had “hit the Titanic trail” relatively late in life. Eva also had a problem with her fellow survivor’s name—on the Titanic she sailed as Elizabeth Gladys, not “Millvina.” “The only time I saw Eva get cross was when Millvina Dean’s name was mentioned,” says Richard. “Let’s just say, the chemistry was not good between them.”
― Andrew Wilson, Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived

“Marjorie can remember the awful expression on her mother’s face when she realized that their father had not been saved. “I can see her now in the hotel corridor, her arms outstretched, giving a howl of despair,” she said. Two weeks later, Arthur’s body was washed up on the shores of Newfoundland.”
― Andrew Wilson, Shadow of the Titanic: The Extraordinary Stories of Those Who Survived