Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image.

A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.

I cry at everything. Simply to spite myself and embarrass myself.

Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

It didn't seem to be summer any more. I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together, and the big white hotel towel I had dragged down with me lay under my head, numb as a snowdrift.

brave love, dream not of staunching such strict flame, but come, lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

Do I love laziness more than I love the feeling of accomplishing work? I take the path of least resistance and curl up with a book.

He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn't. He had what no American man I've ever met has had, and that's intuition.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses. --from Three Women, written March 1962

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.

Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

To feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thicken; to feel the sex organs develop and call loudly to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood.

My head a moon Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

There I went again, building p a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few posy nothings.

We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.

It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

The still waters Wrap my lips, Eyes, nose and ears, A clear Cellophane I cannot crack.

Being mythological does wonders for one's ego.

I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.

I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.