Quotes from Sylvia Plath

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

I wondered what I thought I was burying.

For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

I am your opus.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.

I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.

There is more than one good way to drown.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God

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.

What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

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

The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.

Let me fly with you.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. [I think I made you up inside my head.]