Quotes from Sylvia Plath

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. Save them for my funeral, I'd said.

Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak. --from Lesbos, written 18 October 1962

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. -- from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

I used to pray to recover you. --from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. --from Tulips, written 18 March 1961

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

You smile. No, it is not fatal. --from The Other, written 2 July 1962

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind, and stupid.

I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.