Plath Hughes Quotes

But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. ~ Ted Hughes

And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons. ~ Sylvia Plath

Grey hoped the Church would yet be able to save England from the fate of Tyre or Carthage, the great trading nations ~ Thomas Hughes

Sunday - the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors. ~ Sylvia Plath

What I want back is what I was. ~ Sylvia Plath

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work. ~ John Hughes

Lorelei

It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,

The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,

The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float

Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous

With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more full and clear

Than can be. Sisters, your song
Bears a burden too weighty
For the whorled ear's listening

Here, in a well-steered country,
Under a balanced ruler.
Deranging by harmony

Beyond the mundane order,
Your voices lay siege. You lodge
On the pitched reefs of nightmare,

Promising sure harborage;
By day, descant from borders
Of hebetude, from the ledge

Also of high windows. Worse
Even than your maddening
Song, your silence. At the source

Of your ice-hearted calling-
Drunkenness of the great depths.
O river, I see drifting

Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there. ~ Sylvia Plath

A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say ~ Richard Hughes

Hang yourself, poet, in your own words.
Otherwise, you are dead. ~ Langston Hughes

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. ~ Sylvia Plath

The giving of undue prominence to one fact brings others inexorably on the head of the student to avenge his neglect of them, ~ Thomas Hughes

It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates 'value' and becomes, ipso-facto, harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. ~ Robert Hughes

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not. ~ Robert Hughes

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get. ~ Sylvia Plath

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel. ~ Robert Hughes

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962 ~ Sylvia Plath

If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?"
The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: "It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got excited, I wanted to join in. ~ Ted Hughes

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump. ~ Sylvia Plath

I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain. ~ Sylvia Plath

The message of the Bible is clear: Jesus Christ is Lord! It's a fact. Bringing our lives into submission to His will in everything is the key to being a godly woman. It is also the path to joy. ~ Barbara Hughes

With girls house bristles with suspicion and frigidity; how much is paranoia transference? The damnable thing is that they can sense insecurity and meaness like animals smell blood. ~ Sylvia Plath

I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming. ~ Sylvia Plath

I was thinking that if I'd had the sense to go on living in that old town I might just have met this prison guard in school and married him and had a parcel of kids now. It would be nice, living by the sea with piles of kids and pigs and chickens, wearing what my grandmother called wash dresses, and sitting about in some kitchen with bright linoleum and fat arms, drinking pots of coffee. ~ Sylvia Plath

I have this thing I say to myself that 'tomorrow can be better.' And I remember that period in my life where I never felt like tomorrow could be better. It was always dread for the next day. ~ Clara Hughes

Howard Hughes was in serious trouble. ~ Donald L. Barlett

After that, I felt safer. I didn't want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming from Boston. ~ Sylvia Plath

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart? ~ Sylvia Plath

If I can save a few lives, I'm going to feel much better about myself when this war finally ends. Or if I die, I'll be able to face the Lord. ~ Dean Hughes

Even amongst fierce flames/ The golden lotus can be planted. ~ Bhagavid-Gita

You don't get money unless you have a lot of talent, which I don't have, or you work hard, which is what I do. We don't have any golden touch here. ~ B. Wayne Hughes

I went down to the river, I set down on the bank. I tried to think but couldn't, So I jumped in and sank. ~ Langston Hughes

I am the magician's girl who does not flinch. ~ Sylvia Plath

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home. ~ Langston Hughes

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep. ~ Sylvia Plath

Peace
We passed their graves:
The dead men there,
Winners or losers,
Did not care.
In the dark
They could not see
Who had gained
The victory. ~ Langston Hughes

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you. ~ Sylvia Plath

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... ~ Sylvia Plath

Any display of interest, I can assure you, Nicholas, has been manufactured by dear, sweet, acquisitive Mrs. Pomphrey-Hughes and no other. I'm sure she's a great reader of the classics and well aware of that 'truth universally acknowledged.' And knowing me to be single and in possession of a good fortune, who better to mend my most piteous want of a wife than her own daughter, Daphne? ~ Julianna Deering

I found my home in books,
Where dreams were realised... ~ Frieda Hughes

Being with Jody and Mark and Cal was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of a piano. I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn't read and couldn't write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion. ~ Sylvia Plath

The trumpet player, Ronnie Hughes, has still got his chops today but for some strange reason the culture doesn't call him because he's 83-years-old. And these people are in their 70s and 80s and 90s and came with such verve every day and would still be shooting these 10 and 12 hour days. So, that in itself made this an extraordinarily special occasion for all of us. It wasn't a job for the crew after a few days, it took on another tone. ~ Dustin Hoffman

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art. ~ John Hughes

I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running. ~ Sylvia Plath

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it. ~ Sylvia Plath

I thank God for his many blessings he has given me, but money and prestige are not what it's about. I seek spiritual progression. ~ Glenn Hughes

My room is a twittering gray box with a wall / there and there and there again. ~ Sylvia Plath