Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

I must learn more about these people?try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.

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

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ --from Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, written 1962

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. --From the poem Doom of the Exiles, written 16 April 1954

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

Mother of otherness, Eat me. --from Poem for a Birthday - Who, written 1960

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

No day is safe from news of you. --from The Rival, written July 1961

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

I'll never speak to God again.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

I think I am mad sometimes.