Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Ready for a new life

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief. --from The Couriers, written 4 November 1962

But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier.

I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

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.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything.

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.

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

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.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.

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

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

Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.

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

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

I don't see what women see in other women, I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, Tenderness.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song