Quotes from Sylvia Plath

And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

The great bronze gate began to crack, The sea broke in at every crack, Pellmell, blueblack. --from The Bull of Bendylaw, written 1959

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of my vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.

A small, answering point in my own body flew towards it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery -- air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

I'm stupid about executions.

Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would actually be doing.

Si uno hace algo incorrecto en la mesa con cierta arrogancia, como si supiera perfectamente que está haciendo lo que corresponde, puede salir del paso y nadie pensará que es grosero o que ha recibido una pobre educación. Pensarán que uno es original y muy ocurrente.

Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

Something maternal awakened, perhaps, by the physical contact with such lovely young babies? And tonight was a good night, thus I feel correspondingly tender. There will be other bad nights, but remembering the versatile quicksilver shifting of children's moods, I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track.

Jay Cee's ugly as sin.

I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.

The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.

Then bed, and again the luxury of dark. Still the blood and flesh of me were electric and singing quietly. But it ebbed and ebbed and dark and sleep and oblivion came and came, surging, surging, surging inward, lapping and drowning with no-name, no-identity, none at all. Just nothing, yet the seeds of awakening and life slumbered there in the dark

Why are we conditioned to the smooth, strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world... only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life...

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

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.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels Saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper's (no less!—and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her.

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.