Quotes from Sylvia Plath

She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.

Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.

People or stars regard me sadly. I disappoint them

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?' 'No, what?' I would say. 'A piece of dust.' Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can! I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

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 so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder. "All right, Esther.

Even the apostles were tentmakers...

Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

Maybe it's my ego. Maybe I crave someone who will never be my rival.

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God - or the universal woman-and-man - or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him.

Nigger-eye Berries cast dark Hooks -- Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows.

I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father's slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother's dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.

Read widely of others experiences in thought and action- stretch to others even though it hurts to and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance! Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way, the Spartan way- and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity!

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world. How much of my solicitude for other human beings is real and honest, how much is a feigned lacquer painted on by society, I do not know.

The hurt is not intense when one is hardened to the cold.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

your fate involves a dark assailant

I have had my chances. I have tried and tried. I have stitched life into me like a rare organ, And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare. I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural. I have tried to be blind in love, like other women, Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one, Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

the cat unsheathes its claws the world turns --from Resovle, written 1956

I felt it was very important not to be recognized.

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits best?