Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I like you.' 'That's tough, Joan,' I said, picking up my book. 'Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.

It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in the skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything everyone did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because whenever I sat--on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok-- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness & devours views from windows (stories, movies, overheard talk &sights in the street, pictures in newspapers, etc.) with continuous feeling she is 'just about', miraculously, to come into her own her own life

He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.

I felt my lungd inflate with the inrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.

Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar, but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

It mightn't make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, 'This is what it is to be happy.

A meeting of the lips. that is all, animal as we are, that is our own particular generic peculiarity. And yet, without being vague and star-eyed, I may say that a kiss may be a physical symbol of a mental adoration. That, and a delight.

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side

Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stweing in my own sour air.

My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.

You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not.

The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.

Of course, I didn't know he was a hypocrite at first. I thought he was the most wonderful boy I'd ever seen. I'd adored him from a distance for five years before he even looked at me, and then there was a beautiful time when I still adored him and he started looking at me, and then just as he was looking at me more and more I discovered quite by accident what an awful hypocrite he was, and now he wanted to marry me and I hated his guts.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt

I'd always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.

Winter is for women — The woman, still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas Succeed in banking their fires To enter another year? What will they taste of, the Christmas roses? The bees are flying. They taste the spring. — Sylvia Plath, from "Wintering," Ariel . (Harper & Row 1966)