Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Bir kad?n?n bir tek temiz yaÅŸant?s? olmas? gerektiÄŸi, oysa bir erkeÄŸin biri temiz, öteki temiz olmayan iki tane yaÅŸant?s? olabileceÄŸi düÅŸüncesi çileden ç?kar?yordu beni.

The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a foetus in a bottle.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. After that--in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college with crewing in the mist before breakfast and blackbottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day-- I had never been really happy again.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind as coolly as a tree or a flower.

Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.

I hate saying anything to a group of people. When I talk to a group of people I always have to single out one and talk to him, and all the while I am talking I feel the others are peering at me and taking unfair advantage. I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say 'Fine'.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

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

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. 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.

Ama iÅŸ bunu yapmaya gelince, bileÄŸimin derisi gözüme öylesine beyaz ve savunmas?z göründü ki bir türlü yapmad?m. Sanki as?l öldürmek istediÄŸim ÅŸey o derinin alt?nda ya da paÅŸparma??m?n alt?nda yatan o ince mavi damarda deÄŸil baÅŸka bir yerde, daha derinde, daha gizli ve ula??lmas? çok daha güç bir yerdeydi.

I had a suspicion that my mother had called Jody and begged her to ask me out, so I wouldn't sit around in my room all day with the shades drawn. I didn't want to go at first, because I thought Jody would notice the change in me, and that anybody with half an eye would see I didn't have a brain in my head.

I have a lot to give someone, someday. But I must not be too Christian. 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 same idea. And that will be poetic justice..

As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.

Acontece que eu não estava conduzindo nada, nem a mim mesma. Eu só pulava do meu hotel para o trabalho e para as festas, e das festas para o hotel e então de volta ao trabalho, como um bonde entorpecido. Imagino que eu deveria estar entusiasmada como a maioria das outras garotas, mas eu não conseguia me comover com nada. (Me sentia muito calma e muito vazia, do jeito que o olho de um tornado deve se sentir, movendo-se pacatamente em meio ao turbilhão que o rodeia.)

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old

Não teria feito a menor diferença se ela tivesse me dado uma passagem para Europa ou um cruzeiro ao redor do mundo, porque onde quer que eu estivesse - fosse o convés de um navio, um café parisiense ou Bangcoc -, estaria sempre sob a mesma redoma de vidro, sendo lentamente cozida em meu próprio ar viciado.

Something is gone. My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin Drops me from a terrible altitude. Carapace smashed, I spread to the beaks of birds.

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

It was only after seeing Irwin's study that I decided to seduce him.

I justified the mess I made of life by saying I'd give it order, form, beauty, writing about it;

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 wherever 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.

How clear, how lovely. Now just write the damn thing.

I remembered a worrisome course in the Victorian novel where woman after woman died, palely and nobly, in torrents of blood, after a difficult childbirth.

How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?