Quotes from Sylvia Plath

feel like some eon-old matriarch who has been through ice age and 40-day flood;

But, to salve my conscience, I must feel the pain of work

write every story, not to publish, but to be a better writer, and ipso facto, closer to publishing. Also: don't panic.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have pure motives (oh-it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used it solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism [...]. But I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing, singing, laughing, learning.

He pipes a world of snakes, Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom Of his mind. (...)

O You who eat People like light rays, leave This one Mirror safe, unredeemed By the dove's annihilation, The glory The power, the glory.

O vase of acid, It is love you are full of.

Again, this is a death. Is it the air, The particles of destruction I suck up? Am I a pulse That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel? Is this my lover then? This death, this death?

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ, And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare. I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural. I have tried to be blind in love, like other women, Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one, Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another. I did not look. But still the face was there.

Durumun ne kadar umutsuzsa, seni o kadar uzaÄŸa saklamaya çal???rlar.

Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary. O colour of distance and forgetfulness!

And to wait, taut, smiling, till evening, and the time after eight o'clock, again, to the time you go to bed, which is yours, which is brief and private.

Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place?

This is no time for the private point of view. (from 'Candles')

Sabato mattina, 13 dicembre. E allora impara a vivere. Tagliati una bella porzione di torta con le posate d'argento. Impara come fanno le foglie a crescere sugli alberi. Apri gli occhi. [...] Impara come fa la luna a tramontare nel gelo della notte prima di Natale. Apri le narici. Annusa la neve. Lascia che la vita accada.

Gee baby, you are rare.

The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. I am looking very healthy and flushed and bright eyed, having both a good tan and a rather excellent fever.

I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.

If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on 'Alice in Wonderland' and believing in magic for years and years.

I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.