Sylvia Plath

“I am accused. I dream of massacres.I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now theworld conceivesIts end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.”

“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”

“The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.”

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”

“Ash, ash —-You poke and stir.Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——A cake of soap,A wedding ring,A gold filling.Herr God, Herr LuciferBewareBeware.Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.--from "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

“I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.”

“I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.”

“From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.”

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”

“I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”

“Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”

“Beached under the spumy blooms, we lieSea-sick and fever-dry.--from "Withsun", written 14 February 1961”

“Compared with me, a tree is immortal.”

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

“If you pluck out my heartTo find what makes it move,You’ll halt the clockThat syncopates our love.”

“In PlasterI shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was 
Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold. I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer.
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain, And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up --
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience: She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habits offended her in some way. She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces
Simply because she looked after me so badly. Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful -- Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!
And secretly she began to hope I'd die.Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water.

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her. She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp -- I had forgotten how to walk or sit, So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself. Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully. I used to think we might make a go of it together --
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us. She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit. I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.--written 26 Feburary 1961”

“I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.”

“We'll act as if all this were a bad dream."A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”

“At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moon-brains. I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn’t know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomach-ache or all that caviar I had eaten.”

“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them."(Initiation)”

“I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

“Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.”

“I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”

“I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boatStubbornly hanging on to my name and address.”

“Love, love,I have hung our cave with roses.”

“I am flushed and warm.I think I may be enormous,I am so stupidly happy,My wellingtonsSquelching and squelching through the beautiful red.”

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.--from "Insomniac", written April 1961”

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”

“we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.--from "Tale of A Tub", written 1956”

“I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

“I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.”

“Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.”

“You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”

“If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say that I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.”

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

“Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts Nor the woman in the ambulance Whore red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly....Oh my God, what am IThat these late mouths should cry openIn a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers”

“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

“Although, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burning tookPossession of the most obtuse objects now and then -- ”

“EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.”

“A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”

“The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”

“I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.”

“I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.”

“Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves.All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting.”

“MirrorI am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.Whatever I see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.I am not cruel, only truthful-The eye of the little god, four cornered.Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so longI think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.Faces and darkness separate us over and over.Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Searching my reaches for what she really is.Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.I am important to her. She comes and goes.Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old womanRises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.--written 1960”