Quotes from Sylvia Plath

All the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn't think they had anything to teach me.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

But then, she was practical and a sociology major.

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him. […] I also needed somebody quite experienced to make up for my lack of it […].

Where do you stash your life?

I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.

My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.

I cannot undo myself

It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the cadaver's head--or what there was left of it--floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast... and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver's head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

How I would like to believe in tenderness.

Her college was so fashion-conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocket-book covers made out of the same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had a matching pocket-book. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvellous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.

My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

What the hell is tragedy? I am.

This black boot has no mercy for anybody. Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot

A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything.

They thought death was worth it, but I Have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, With her lion-red body, her wings of glass? Now she is flying More terrible than she ever was, red Scar in the sky, red comet Over the engine that killed her- The mausoleum, the wax house.

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations... I certainly learned a lot of things this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

Me sentía embotada y pesada y llena de sueños destruidos.

What was there about us, in Belize [asylum], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.

I can only end up with one, and I must leave many lonely by the wayside. So that is all for now. Perhaps someday someone will leave me by the wayside. And that will be poetic justice.

Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: I'll go take a hot bath.

Se ser neurótico é querer ao mesmo tempo duas coisas mutuamente excludentes, então eu sou uma baita de uma neurótica. Vou ficar correndo de uma coisa mutuamente excludente pra outra pelo resto da minha vida.