Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way the Spartan way - and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

Go out and do something. It isn't your room that's a prison, it's yourself.

What do you have in mind after you graduate? What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. I don't really know, I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. --from Tale of A Tub, written 1956

I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

There was a beautiful time...

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.

O love, how did you get here? --from Nick and the Candlestick, written 29 October 1962

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. --from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

And I, love, am a pathological liar.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. --from Insomniac, written April 1961

I am I am I am.

I am myself. That is not enough. --from The Jailer, written 17 October 1962

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.