Quotes from Sylvia Plath

What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit's cry may be wilder But it has no soul.

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been analyzed. Instead, all I could see were question marks.

I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn't matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

It always has to end, doesn't it? We always have to separate.' 'Yes,' I said. He was insistent, 'But it doesn't always have to be that way. We could be together some day for always.' 'Oh, no,' I told him, wondering if he knew it was all over. 'We keep running till we die. We separate, get further apart, till we are dead.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.