Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.

She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.

The claw / Of the magnolia, / Drunk on its own secrets, / Asks nothing of life.

I am silver and exact.I have no preconceptions.

Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness...

I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.

Something in me wants more. I can't rest.

But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache.

I liked looking at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

Well, I tried drowning, but that didn't work; somehow the urge to life, mere physical life, is damn strong, and I felt that I could swim forever straight out into the sea and sun and never be able to swallow more than a gulp or two of water and swim on. The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

Already she feels jaded. Weary, and gladly tired and old.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.

After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.

The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound, which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.

I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.

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.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident.

Yet I liked him too much… way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn't get to hurt me more than it did.

Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.