Quotes from Sylvia Plath

You can outline the people you've lived with these past years in a few sentences ... yet could you give an account of their lives, their hopes, their dreams? You could try, perhaps, but they would be much the same as yours... for you are all an inexplicable unity - this family group with its twisted tensions, unreasoning loves and solidarity and loyalty born and bred in blood. These people are the ones most basically responsible for what you are.

I don't really 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.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

Buddy hugged his father,and promptly, with a dreadful brightness, came over to me and held out his had.I shook it. It felt fat and moist.

Para a pessoa dentro da redoma de vidro, vazia e imóvel como um bebê morto, o mundo inteiro é um sonho ruim.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter—for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.…

Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen.' [...] I sat like that for about an hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot doll in her mother's old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well.

Também lembrei de Buddy Williard dizendo com uma voz sinistra e sabichona que depois que tivéssemos filhos eu me sentiria diferente e não mais teria vontade de escrever poemas. E me ocorreu que talvez fosse verdade aquela história de que casar e ter filhos era como passar por uma lavagem cerebral, e que depois eu que você ficava inerte feito um escravo num pequeno estado totalitário.

Cuando yo tenía 19 años la pureza era un gran tema. El mundo estaba dividido entre católicos y protestantes, o entre republicanos o demócratas o entre blancos y negros, o aun entre hombres y mujeres, yo lo veía dividido entre la gente que se había acostado con alguien y la gente que no lo había hecho, y ésta parecía ser la única diferencia verdaderamente significativa entre una persona y otra

Mi árbol favorito era el sauce llorón. Yo pensé que debían de haberlo traído del Japón. En Japón entendían las cosas del espíritu

Buddy me decía que estaba leyendo poemas escritos por alguien que también era médico y que había descubierto que había un famoso cuentista ruso, ya muerto, que también había sido médico, así que era posible que los escritores y los médicos congeniaran.

Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images.

from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as i sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true

What love did then, love does now: Gnaws me through.

I made a point of never living in the same house with my mother for more than a week.

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me With its yellow purses, its spiky armoury. I could not run without having to run forever.

I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee's love-seat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.

What I fear most I think, is the death of the imagination.

Worse Even than your maddening Song, your silence.

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long. You've got to be able to talk. That's tough. But spend your nights learning, so you'll have something to say.