Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I do not like to think of all the things, familiar, useful and worthy things, I have never put into a poem.

They loll forever in collossal sleep; Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up From their fond, final, infamous decay

We get well first, then we work.

the razor slitting the stomach, and the life throbbing away, red flood by red flood - I lay crouched, kneeling on the khaki quilt on the living room floor where there was air

Meanwhile, read Hopkins for solace.

In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in.

From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naive and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Very simply, you were not wise to give me your image. You should know your woman, and be kind. You expect too much of me; you know I am not strong enough to live merely in that abstract Platonic realm out of time and flesh on the other side of all those mirrors.

feeding on the furies of cassandra, she prophesys and hears the "falling glass and toppling masonry" of troy while hector pats her torn and tangled hair and murmurs: "There, there, mad sister.

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world

two over-lapping circles, with a certain strong riveted centre of common ground, but both with separate arcs jutting out in the world. A balanced tension, adaptable to circumstances, in which there is an elasticity of pull, tension, yet firm unity . . . . I do not believe . . . that artistic creativity can best be indulged in masterful singleness rather than in marital cooperation. I think that a workable union should heighten the potentialities in both individuals.

I fought and fought to free myself as from the weight of a name that could be a baby or could be a malignant tumor; I knew not. I only feared.

Especially after I read Pete DeVries recent scintillant "Afternoon of a Faun." There are ways and ways to have a love affair. Above all, one must not be serious about it.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt....

This part of the woman in me, the concrete, present, immediate part, which needs the warmth of her man in bed and her man eating with her and her man thinking and communing with her soul: this part still cries to you:

We all live in our own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care.

Rooms.Every room a world. To be god: to be every life before we die: a dream to drive men mad. But to be one person, one woman- to live, suffer, bear children and learn others lives and make them into print worlds spinning like planets in the minds of other men.

For, I am committed to you

My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.

We are not what we might be; what we are Outlaws all extrapolation Beyond the interval of now and here: White whales are gone with the white ocean.

We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quietly die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.

The future is a grey seagull Tattling in its cat-voice of departure. Age and terror, like nurses, attend her, And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold, Crawls up out of the sea. --from A Life, written 18 November 1960

You are a prisoner of sorts, and yet you have made yourself so.