Quotes from Sylvia Plath

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.

talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doc- toring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.

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 people did seemed so silly because they only died in the end.

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions

saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, 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.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road

Now I am surely becoming an incurable romantic.

And I knew in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life.

Then I thought, how could this Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card?

It was as if we had been forced together by some overwhelming circumstances, like war or plague, and shared a world of our own.

I could feel the tears start to spurt from the screwed-up nozzles of my eyes.

I may have had a straight A in physics, but I was panick-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I picked up my pocketbook and started back over the cold stones to where my shoes kept their vigil in the violet light.

Habría un hoyo negro de seis pies de profundidad en el duro suelo. Esa sombra se uniría con esta sombra, y el peculiar suelo amarillento de nuestra localidad sellaría la herida en la blancura, y otra nevada borraría la novedad en la tumba de Joan

After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one son and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

I hate it, find it hideous, loathsome. I have built it up to a devouring, malicious monster. I am letting it ruin my whole life. My reason is leaving me, and I want to get out of this.

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I want was infinite security. I want change and excitement and shoot off in all directions by myself

and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

What did I think was wrong? That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.

His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for something, but I couldn't think what it would be short for, unless it was California.

Sentí que mis pulmones se inflaban con la avalancha de paisajes: aire, montañas, árboles, personas. Pensé: esto es lo que es ser feliz.

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" "No, what?" I said. "A piece of dust.