Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts Nor the woman in the ambulance Whore red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly .... Oh my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers

This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.

Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying.

My mother smiled. I knew my baby wasn't like that. I looked at her. Like what? Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital. She paused. I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

Neurotic, ha! I let out a scornful laugh. If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.

I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.

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 knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint.

My heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

I'm so jealous I can't speak.

I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily. If I get through this year, kicking my demon down when it comes up, I'll be able, piece by piece, to face the field of life, instead of running from it the minute it hurts.

She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odours bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

I don't see what women see in other women, I told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, Tenderness. That shut me up.