Quotes from Sylvia Plath

They have too many colors, too much life. They are not quiet, quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

and with a tolerant smile that was a superior lie, I walked on.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol. I crawl like an ant in mourning over the weedy acres of your brow to mend the immense skull-plates and clear the bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of Oresteia....

To know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing.

The future is what matters because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present.

He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair Who has saltier aphrodisiacs Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death, Her wormy couriers are at his bones. Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.

What did my arms do before they held you?" ? Sylvia Plath

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of non-feeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.

For instance, I could hold my nose, close my eyes, and jump blindly into the waters of some man's insides, submerging myself until his purpose becomes my purpose, his life, my life, and so on. One fine day I would float to the surface, quite drowned, and supremely happy with my newfound selfless self.

So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.

Io sono il presente, ma so che anch'io me ne andrò. L'instante sublime, la fiamma che consuma arriva e subito scompare: sabbie mobili, semore. E io non voglio morire.

The most saddening thing is to admit that I am not in love. I can only love (if that means self denial - or does it mean self fulfillment? Or both?) by giving up my love of self and ambitions - why, why, why, can't I combine ambition for myself and another?

Quando infine trovi qualcuno in cui senti di poter riversare la tua anima, ti blocchi di colpo davanti alle tue stesse parole - le hai tenute dentro così a lungo, contratte nel buio, che sono ormai sbiadite, brutte, banali, fiacche. Sì, c'è l'allegria, l'autorealizzazione, lo stare insieme: ma la solitudine dell'anima, nella sua spaventosa consapevolezza, è insopportabile, soverchiante.

I am at Smith because I wanted it and worked for it. I am going to be a Guest Editor on Mlle in June because I wanted it and worked for it. I am being published in Harper's because I wanted it and worked for it. Luckily I could translate wish to reality by the work.

My health is making stories, poems, novels, of experience: that is why, or, rather, that is why it is good, that I have suffered & been to hell, although not to all the hells. I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life." ? Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

Perchè mi sento libera di scriverle [le parole]? La mia identità prende forma, si modella - sento che i racconti fioriscono mentre leggo la raccolta del New Yorker - sì, quanto i tempi saranno maturi, io sarò tra loro - le poetesse, le autrici.

Ho talmente riempito la mia riserva di giorni e maschere che adesso posso e devo passare gli anni a pescare, a tirar su mostri dagli occhi di perla, coriacei, squamosi e con barbe marine, sommersi da lungo tempo nel mar dei Sargassi della mia immaginazione.

So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing, Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.

I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water—so fast that I have little time to stop running.

è come sollevara una campana di vetro posta sopra una comunità dove tutto funziona come un meccanismo oliato, e vedere i minuscoli, indaffarati abitanti arrestarsi di colpo, boccheggiare, gonfiarsi e librarsi nell'aflusso ( anzi, nel deflusso) della rarefatta atmosfera della norma: poveri esserini spaventati che agitano le braccia impotenti nell'aria indecisa. è così che ci sente a liberarsi dalla routine.

Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.

die letzte brücke.

Cuándo llegará el momento en que el Tiempo se quiebre, Y la eternidad lo engulla, y yo me hunda del todo?