Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

I am not cruel — only truthful.

I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero.

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.

I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

beating time along the edge of thought.

The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.

The storerooms are full of hearts. This is the city of spare parts.

I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

From now on when a boy starts telling me about his lost loves I am going to run in the opposite direction screaming loudly... Somehow I bring out such confidences, and I'm pretty sick of hearing about Bobbe or Dorothy or P.K. or Liota. God damn them all.

I think I'm in love with missing you more than I'm in love with you.

We all like to think that we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

Then my gaze slid over the people to the blaze of green beyond the diaphanous curtains, and I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of race.

I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway..

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

A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk.   It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, its a poultice. You have an eye, its an image. My boy, its your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware.