Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.

You are a dream. I hope I never meet you.

The tropical, stale heat the sidewalks had been sucking up all day hit me in the face like a last insult.

The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions are different from a women's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly.

And he walked off down the path with his jaunty, independent stride. And I stood there where he left me, tremulous with love and longing, weeping in the dark. That night it was hard to get to sleep.

conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.

Our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me.

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

Around the overturned enamel tray, a star of thermometer shards glittered, and balls of mercury trembled like celestial dew.

the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.

If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit. Black or gray, or brown, even. Blue just makes me laugh.

My ribs show. What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.

If neurotic is wanting two mutally exclusive things at once and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutally exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

What do you do? I asked the man, to break the silence shooting up around me on all sides, thick as jungle grass

Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isn't just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get married. If only I can find him ... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

After that, I felt safer. I didn't want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming from Boston.

Semmi sem valódi, csak a jelen, és én máris érzem, századok súlya fojtogat. Élt egy lány száz évvel ezelÅ'tt is, mint ahogy én most. ? halott. Én vagyok a jelen, de tudom, hogy egyszer én is elt?nök. A nagy pillanat, a lángcsóva, jön és megy, véghetetlen futóhomok. Nem akarok meghalni, nem.

They had the windows fixed so you couldn't really open them and lean out, and for some reason this made me furious.

Never try to knock on rotten wood.