Quotes from Sylvia Plath

That's tough, Joan, I said, picking up my book. Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.

The words in his book wormed off the pages. Everything glittered like blank paper.

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 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.

O love, O celibate. Nobody but me Walks the waist high wet. The irreplaceable Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.   I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet, They stand their vigil in gowns of stone, Faces blank as the day I was born, Their shadows long in the setting sun That never brightens or goes down. And this is the kingdom you bore me to, Mother, mother. But no frown of mine Will betray the company I keep.

I remember a blue eye, A briefcase of tangerines.

I craved him constantly, so deeply it was a physical ache

I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me - draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that- I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much- so very much to learn.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.   I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a redblooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn't pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well.

Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.

Quién es este terrible muchacho azul, extraño y brillante, como caído de una estrella?

I will be a little god in my small way.

This hotel-the Amazon- was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn't get at them and deceive them.

I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have.

I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in e like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I like you. That's tough, Joan, I said, picking up my book. Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know. And I walked out of the room, leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed.

Lord, thy children are jaded, and their ears go flat with sound. Marveling in the thunder rumbling of thy voice no longer - they hear not, and the omens of the white gull and the flayed oak are as naught to their purblind sight. The prophecy in the thunder, the foreshadowings of the leaves quivering white, the dismay of the grass bent in the merciless wind are naught, lord.

Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

The tulips are too excitable; it is winter here Look at how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed in I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands I am nobody, I have nothing to do with explosions I have given my name and my dayclothes to the nurses, and my history to the anesthetist, and my body to the surgeons

Look what can happen in this country, they'd say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can't afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.

I am I, with all the individuality of an earthworm. After a rain, who knows the unique pink worm by the twist of its elastic segments. Only the guts of the worm know. And it is nothing to crush the yellow liquid intestines under a casual heel.

And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments.