Tagged: Sylvia Plath

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath – 23 October, 1961

Writer’s Advice

Reading and writing are two of my favourite things. People like George Orwell, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, Zadie Smith: stimulate my thought process and give me inspiration.

“Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.” – Zadie Smith

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very:’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” – Mark Twain

“My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.” – Anton Chekhov

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” – Virginia Woolf

“Don’t be a writer; be writing.” – William Faulkner

Language is my oxygen.