Quotes from Sylvia Plath

How many different deaths I can die?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace. --from Pursuit, written 1956

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. --from Tulips, written 18 March 1961

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.

God, who am I?

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

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.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

Not being perfect hurts.

I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more

I wait and ache.

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.

God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.

I wish I knew what to do with my life, what to do with my heart…I do nothing all day, boredom settles in, I look at the sky so I get to feel even smaller than I already feel and my mind keeps poisoning itself uselessly.

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

The box is only temporary.

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.

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.