Sylvia Plath

“I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn't ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn't speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese. I didn't even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN men in front of me represented fitted in on the map.For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”

“I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”

“I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.”

“A small, answering point in my own body flew towards it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery -- air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

“brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.”

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

“Se nevrotico vuol dire desiderare contemporaneamente due cose che si escludono a vicenda, allora io sono nevrotica all'ennesima potenza. Volerò su e giù dall'una all'altra per il resto dei miei giorni.”

“Pensavo: dovrebbe esserci un rituale per nascere una seconda volta: rappezzata, rinchiusa e poi riconosciuta idonea a riprendere la via.”

“Dette hotellet - Hotel Amazon - var bare for kvinner, for det meste piker på min alder med velstående foreldre som ville være sikre på at døtrene deres bodde et sted hvor menn ikke kunne få tak i dem og narre dem; og alle sammen gikk på snobbete sekretærskoler som Katy Gibbs; hvor de måtte gå med hatt og strømper og hansker i timene, eller de var nettopp uteksaminert fra skoler som Katy Gibbs og var sekretærer for sjefer og juniorsjefer og bare hang rundt i New York og ventet på å bli gift med en eller annen karrieremann.”

“Det må være en god del ting et varmt bad ikke kurerer, men jeg vet ikke om mange av dem. Hver gang jeg føler meg trist fordi jeg skal dø, eller så nervøs at jeg ikke får sove, eller forelsket i noen jeg ikke kommer til å se på en uke, gir jeg etter til et visst punkt, og så sier jeg; Jeg går og tar et varmt bad.”

“Jeg er ikke sikker på hvorfor, men jeg elsker mat mer enn nesten noe annet. Samme hvor mye jeg spiser, legger jeg aldri på meg. Med ett unntak har jeg veid det samme i årevis.”

“As I paddled on, mt heartbeat boomed like a motor in my ears. I am I am I am.”

“Yo lo recordaba todo. (...)Quizá el olvido, como una bondadosa nieve, los entumeciera y los cubriera.Pero eran parte de mí. Eran m paisaje.”

“Me sentía embotada y pesada y llena de sueños destruidos.”

“Si uno no espera nada de alguien nunca se siente desilusionado.”

“Me sentía sabia y cínica como el infierno.”

“Me sentía muy tranquila y muy vacía, como debe de sentirse el ojo de un tornado que se mueve con ruido sordo en medio del estrépito circundante.”

“Para la persona encerrada en la campana de cristal, vacía y detenida como un bebé muerto, el mundo mismo es la pesadilla.”

“The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.”

“A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.”

“I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”

“You oughtn't to see this," Will muttered in my ear. "You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't to let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race.”

“They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.”

“Five balls! Five bright brass balls!To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.”

“I remember a blue eye,A briefcase of tangerines.”

“The storerooms are full of hearts.This is the city of spare parts.”

“You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,Two suicides, the family wolves,Hours of blankness.”

“The words in his book wormed off the pages.Everything glittered like blank paper.”

“Your shelled bed I remember.Father, this thick air is murderous.I would breathe water.”

“the cat unsheathes its clawsthe world turns--from "Resovle", written 1956”

“Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.”

“I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.”

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

“On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.”

“I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me”

“To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itselfis a bad dream”

“Over your body the clouds goHigh, high and icilyAnd a little flat, as if theyFloated on a glass that was invisible.Unlike swans, Having no reflections;Unlike you, With no strings attached.All cool, all blue. Unlike youYou, there on your back,Eyes to the sky.”

“I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.”

“That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses."Save them for my funeral," I'd said.”

“Not being perfect hurts.”

“Talking about my fears to others feeds it.”

“Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”

“Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying.”

“I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.”

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

“My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.”

“She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.”

“I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.”

“What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.”