Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff like parchment.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week.

Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play Goodbye My Fancy, of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.

From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence.

Comecei a entender como os misóginos conseguiam fazer as mulheres de bobas. Eles eram como deuses: invulneráveis e poderosos. Eles desciam à terra e desapareciam. Era impossível colocar as mãos neles.

Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, 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 fitted the lid on my typewriter and clicked it shut.

Era com si el que jo volia matar no fos pas fins d'aquella pell […], sinó arreu, més endins, més secret, i molt més difícil d'atansar-hi.

I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms. And in truth it is terrible, Multiplied in the eyes of the flies.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. Sylvia Plath, Ariel; from 'The Moon and the Yew Tree

From another, distanced mind, I saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by two white clapboard walls, a mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box hedge, small as a doll in a doll's house.

I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

If I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semicircles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.

Kendimi koÅŸu yolu olmayan bir dünyada yaÅŸayan bir yar?? at? gibi hissediyordum.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. 'Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.' I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee's window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

Where are you going?' I was about to say, 'Back to the asylum', but the man looked promising, so I changed my mind.

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

I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

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 afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

To ticho mÄ› deprimovalo. PÃ…â"¢itom to nebylo ticho normálního ticha. Bylo to moje vlastní ticho.

He felt the ground frail as a bird's skull under his feet, a mere shell of sanity and decorum between him and the dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source.

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad infinitely desolate avenue.

What's the matter with me?' 'Poisoned,' she said briefly. 'Poisoned, the whole lot of you. I never seen anythin' like it. Sick here, sick there, whatever have you young ladies been stuffin' yourselves with?

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword-swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and god-like.

Si ser neurótica es decir dos cosas mutuamente excluyentes en el mismo momento, entonces soy endemoniadamente neurótica. Estaré volando de una a otra cosa mutuamente excluyente durante el resto de mi vida