Sylvia Plath

“I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”

“I'm never going to get married.""You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind.""No. My mind's made up.”

“There I went again, building p a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few posy nothings.”

“If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.”

“It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”

“What do you have in mind after you graduate?"What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue."I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

“I should have loved a thunderbird instead;At least when spring comes they roar back again.I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

“daddy daddy you bastard, i'm through”

“I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.”

“I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned upand be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)”

“It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell- tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.”

“I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.”

“The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water—as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.”

“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?”

“Can nothingness be so prodigal?”

“When I walk out, I am a great event. I do not have to think, or even rehearse.What happens in me will happen without attention.The pheasant stands on the hill;He is arranging his brown feathers.I cannot help smiling at what it is I know. Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.”

“Let me sit in a flowerpot,The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.”

“Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.Thirty years now I have laboredTo dredge the silt from your throat.I am none the wiser.”

“I'm a riddle in nine syllables,An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off.”

“Let me fly with you.”

“Even the apostles were tentmakers...”

“I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him”

“The woman is perfected.Her deadBody wears the smile of accomplishment,The illusion of a Greek necessityFlows in the scrolls of her toga,Her bareFeet seem to be saying:We have come so far, it is over.Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,One at each littlePitcher of milk, now empty.She has foldedThem back into her body as petalsOf a rose close when the gardenStiffens and odors bleedFrom the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.The moon has nothing to be sad about,Staring from her hood of bone.She is used to this sort of thing.Her blacks crackle and drag.”

“Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”

“I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.”

“And I, stepping from this skinOf old bandages, boredoms, old facesStep to you from the black car of Lethe,Pure as a baby.”

“Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart?”

“Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.And the message of the yew tree is blackness--blackness and silence.”

“The lawn was white with doctors”

“Empty, I echo to the least footfall”

“On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.”

“The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.”

“I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”

“I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. (...) I want, I think, to be omniscient… I think I would like to call myself "The girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but to what extent? I am I.”

“I was my own woman.The next step was to find the proper sort of man.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.”

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.--from "The Moon and the Yew Tree", written 22 October 1961”

“I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.”

“I am myself. That is not enough.--from "The Jailer", written 17 October 1962”

“Félek. Hogy miről? Leginkább a meg nem élt élettől. Mi számít?”

“The claw / Of the magnolia, / Drunk on its own secrets, / Asks nothing of life.”

“we walk the plank with strangers.”

“My room is a twittering gray box with a wall / there and there and there again.”

“There is more than one good way to drown.”

“your fate involves a dark assailant”

“Water will run by rule; the actual sun / Will scrupulously rise and set; / No little man lives in the exacting moon / And that is that, is that, is that.”

“Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have”

“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.”

“If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.”