Quotes from Sylvia Plath

pero cuando llegó el momento de hacerlo, la piel de mi muñeca parecía tan blanca e indefensa que no pude. era como si lo que yo quería matar no estuviera en esa piel ni en el ligero pulso azul que saltaba bajo mi pulgar, sino en alguna parte, más profunda, más secreta y mucho más difícil de alcanzar.

I thought of crawling in between the bed sheets and trying to sleep, but that appealed to me about as much as stuffing a dirty, scrawled-over letter into a fresh, clean envelope. I decided to take a hot bath. There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.

Girls like that make me sick. I'm so jealous I can't speak.

I wanted to see as much as I could. I liked looking on 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. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating 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. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

I said to myself: Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don't know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.

I made a decision about Doreen that night. I decided I would watch her and listen to what she said, but deep down I would have nothing at all to do with her.

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 of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

I stared at Buddy while he unzipped his chino pants and took them off and laid them on a chair and then took off his underpants that were made of something like nylon fishnet. 'They're cool,' he explained, 'and my mother says they wash easily.

What do you have in mind after you graduate? I really don't 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.

historians will say 'We have a few documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men.

Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing.

Para la persona encerrada en la campana de cristal, vacía y detenida como un bebé muerto, el mundo mismo es la pesadilla.

Anonymous young men with all-American bone structures.

If I had to strain my brain with any more of that stuff I would go mad.

Maybe forgetfullness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

El suelo parecía maravillosamente sólido. Era consolador saber que me había caído y que no podía caer más abajo.

Even in the days I feel the worst, I feel glad to be alive. To be a part of this journey called life. To be one of the lucky 7 billion. Why was I chosen to be here? I must have a meaning, right? There's a big picture already painted of my life, my legacy, my happiness. I just have to trust in it.

My biggest trouble is that people look at me and think that no serious trouble has ever troubled my little head. They seldom realize the chaos that seethes behind my exterior. As for the who Am I, what am I angle...that will preoccupy me till the day I die.

The room hovered around me with great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were withholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty.

I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.

And when the balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence How you jump—