Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen. - 10 January 1953

Let me not be sentimental, let the distance in time give me humor and irony and a shrewd, if loving, eye.

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell- tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.

No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars ...

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

And we, too, had a relationship— Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

Every woman adores a fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a tombstone.

You inherit white heather, a bee's wing, Two suicides, the family wolves, Hours of blankness.

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.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: I'll go take a hot bath.

At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked like nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moon-brains. I felt in terrible danger of puking. I didn't know whether it was the awful movie giving me a stomach-ache or all that caviar I had eaten.

I feel gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow.

Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.

They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disembowelled themselves when anything went wrong.

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas

The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.

Whore or courtesan, she put on a great little show.

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars, the trees and flowers were strewing their cool odos. There was no moon.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still.

I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory (with a gray man in a gray boat in a gray river: an apathetic Charon dawdling upon a passionless phlegmatic River Styx ... and a petulant Christ child bawling on the train ... ).

You are still on your own; be stoic; don't panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing GIVING love of spring... dawn came, black and white gray into a frozen hell. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.