“Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.”

— Margaret Atwood

On Writing Poetry (1995)

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Margaret Atwood 348

Canadian writer 1939

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“Twenty-one years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos.”

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Quote of Israels, as cited in a letter of A. Verwey, The Hague 28 August 1888, to his wife K. van Vloten; as cited in Briefwisseling 1 juli 1885 tot 15 december 1888 (1995)–Albert Verwey http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/verw008brie01_01/verw008brie01_01_0580.php, pp. 497-98
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

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