Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,
Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue,
What have we after that to look forward to?
Not the twilight of the gods but a precise dawn
of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.
—Louis MacNeice
“Aubade”
We only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.…
—W. B. Yeats
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.…
—James Joyce
These were epigraphs in Plath’s original notebook.