Quotes from Sylvia Plath

The silence depressed me. It was not the silence of silence it was my own silence.

All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.

I do think that it is hard for me to share myself with everyone. My introspection and queer thoughts always make me feel no one will understand – except someone I love. When I love someone, I make myself increasingly vulnerable to them – and give them the power to hurt me by letting them know my sensitive spots

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into.

Sunday - the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.

My mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung like a bird, in the center of empty air.

to be aware that you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm.

You defy questions; You defy other godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom's border, Exiled to no good.

All I'd heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for. So I didn't really see the harm in anything Buddy would think up to do.

The Hanging Man By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet. The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid: A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket. A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree. If he were I, he would do what I did.

There was no absence of lips, there were two children, But their bones showed, and the moon smiled.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

If I lived by the sea I would never be really sad. I get an immense sense of eternity and peace from the ocean. I can lose myself in staring at it hour after hour. --from a letter to Aurelia Plath, written c. July 1951

I am too pure for you or anyone. Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

Avocados are my favourite fruit.

Why is it that I find it so difficult to accept the present moment, whole as an apple, without cutting and hacking at it to find a purpose, or setting it up on a shelf with other apples to measure its worth or trying to pickle it in brine to preserve it, and crying to find it turns all brown and is no longer simply the lovely apple I was given in the morning?

This is a case without a body. The body does not come into it at all.

When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.

All the gods know is destinations.

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.

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.

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

I said maybe if you loved a woman it wouldn't seem so boring, but Eric said it would be spoiled by thinking this woman too was just an animal like the rest, so if he loved anybody he would never go to bed with her. He'd go to a whore if he had to and keep the woman he loved free from all the dirty business.