Do you know that feeling when you find a quote that just speaks to you? I recently came across one while watching the Netflix original, Master of None.

This quote is from Sylvia Plath’s only novel, which is a semi-autobiographical story of her life, with the names of real people and places altered. Wikipedia states that, “The book is often regarded as a roman à clef since the protagonist’s descent into mental illness parallels Plath’s own experiences with what may have been clinical depression“.

If you’d like Aziz Ansari to read it to you, then by all means skip over the quote below. Otherwise if you’d like to ponder the nature of life in a more introspective fashion, Sylvia Plath’s writing is at your beck and call:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Very touching.

Quotes

The Fig Tree

Quote of the week