Quotes from Sylvia Plath

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) --from Mad Girl's Love Song: A Villanelle, written 1954

Why honey, don't you want to get dressed? My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon. I'm writing a novel, I said. I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.

I woke to the sound of rain.

I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say fine

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, 'Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. –-from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.

it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. --from Kindness, written 1 February 1963

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

I wish you'd find the exit out of my head.

I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet. --from Lesbos, written 18 October 1962

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls. --from Crossing the Water, written 1962

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. --from Poem For A Birthday - The Stones, written 1959