Quotes from Sylvia Plath

You oughtn't to see this, Will muttered in my ear. You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't to let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race.

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.

I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.

Men have used her meanly. She will eat them

love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart.

We'll take up where we left off, Esther', she had said, with her sweet martyr's smile. 'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.' A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything.

It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off? How long can I be Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand, Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon? The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow Lap at my back ineluctably. How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain Ã¢â'¬Â¦ remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

Why do my beheld beauties vanish and deform themselves as soon as I look twice.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual…

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, Kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Can nothingness be so prodigal?

This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up by making her life miserable.

Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

I love you because you are me ... my writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way. 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. I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print.

Empty, I echo to the least footfall

I've been wondering. . . I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something. Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative -- the face of a man who often does not get what he wants.