Quotes from Sylvia Plath

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. From the poem Cut, 24 October 1962

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.

Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.

I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.

I think I may well be a Jew.

They might ignore me immediately. In my moon suit and funeral veil. I am no source of honey So why should they turn on me? Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.

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 color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.

Life happens so hard and fast I sometimes wonder who is me...

Me sentía muy tranquila y muy vacía, como debe de sentirse el ojo de un tornado que se mueve con ruido sordo en medio del estrépito circundante.

There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart—— It really goes.

She looked terrible, but very wise.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.

daddy daddy you bastard, i'm through

There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace?

we walk the plank with strangers.

This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.

What a man wants is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.