Sylvia Plath

“The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.”

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

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

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

“Out of the ash I rise with my red hairand I eat men like air.”

“I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.”

“Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.”

“DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died before I had time―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toeBig as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish AtlanticWhen it pours bean green over blueIn the waters of beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars.But the name of the town is common.My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two.So I never could tell where youPut your foot, your root,I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare.Ich, ich, ich, ich,I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you.And the language obscene An engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.I began to talk like a Jew.I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of ViennaAre not very pure or true.With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luckAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You― Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut no less a devil for that, no notAnd less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I’m finally through.The black telephone’s off at the root,The voices just can’t worm through. If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two―The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year,Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now. There’s a stake in your fat black heartAnd the villagers never like you.They are dancing and stamping on you.They always knew it was you.Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

“His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn't want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.The Tide ebbed, sucked back into itself. There I was, a reject, with the dried black seaweed whose hard beads I liked to pop, hollowed orange and grapefruit halves and a garbage of shells. All at once, old and lonely, I eyed these-- razor clams, fairy boats, weedy mussels, the oyster's pocked gray lace (there was never a pearl) and tiny white "ice cream cones." You could always tell where the best shells were-- at the rim of the last wave, marked by a mascara of tar. I picked up, frigidly, a stiff pink starfish. It lay at the heart of my palm, a joke dummy of my own hand. Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.”

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”

“I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.”

“God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.”

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. ”

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty of a garden bedAttracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,Unknowing I must soon unpetal.Compared with me, a tree is immortalAnd a flower-head not tall, but more startling,And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.Sometimes I think that when I am sleepingI must most perfectly resemble them--Thoughts gone dim.It is more natural to me, lying down.Then the sky and I are in open conversation,And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961”

“I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”

“Dying Is an art, like everything else.I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I have a call.”

“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 as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”

“I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.”

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

“A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”

“Mother of otherness, Eat me.--from "Poem for a Birthday - Who", written 1960”

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”

“I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”

“You smile.No, it is not fatal.--from "The Other", written 2 July 1962”

“I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.”

“I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.”

“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

“I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know."Oh, sure you know," the photographer said."She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”

“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

“I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.”

“I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon's celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look's leashDangles the puppet-peopleWho, unaware how they dwindle,Laugh, kiss, get drunk,Nor guess that if I choose to blinkThey die.IWhen in good humour,Give grass its greenBlazon sky blue, and endow the sunWith gold;Yet, in my wintriest moods, I holdAbsolute powerTo boycott color and forbid any flowerTo be.IKnow you appearVivid at my side,Denying you sprang out of my head,Claiming you feelLove fiery enough to prove flesh real,Though it's quite clearAll your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,From me."Soliloquy of the Solipsist", 1956”

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the dayBefore we fell, like Icarus, undone;All we find are altars in decayAnd profane words scrawled black across the sun.--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

“What did my arms do before they held you?”

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

“And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closesIts bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.--from "Tulips", written 18 March 1961”

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I 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.”