Quotes from Sylvia Plath

to learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there's butter on it

At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

I hate saying anything to a group of people. When I talk to a group of people I always have to single out one and talk to him,and all the while I am talking I feel the others are peering at me and taking unfair advantage. I also hate people to ask cheerfully how are you when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say Fine

This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.

I couldn't stand was Buddy's pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure, when all the time he'd been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing in my face.

I don't see what women see in other women, I told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, Tenderness. That shut me up.

When I walk out, I am a great event. I do not have to think, or even rehearse. What happens in me will happen without attention. The pheasant stands on the hill; He is arranging his brown feathers. I cannot help smiling at what it is I know. Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.

Monologue At 3 AM Better that every fiber crack and fury make head, blood drenching vivid couch, carpet, floor and the snake-figured almanac vouching you are a million green counties from here, than to sit mute, twitching so under prickling stars, with stare, with curse blackening the time goodbyes were said, trains let go, and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from my one kingdom.

Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. --from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind cooly as a tree or a flower.

Buddy Willard went to Yale, but now I thought of it, what was wrong with him was that he was stupid. Oh, he'd managed to get good marks all right, and to have an affair with some awful waitress on the Cape by the name of Gladys, but he didn't have one speck of intuition. Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

But not so odd a name, after all, if you've ever read through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and Sasparilla Greenleafs. I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren't called Smith.

You fool – you are afraid of being alone with you own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. Your room is not your prison. You are.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

The consequences of love affairs would stop me from my independent freedom of creative activity, and I don't intend to be stopped.

It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days. And when I eventually did decide to do something, such as packing a suitcase, I only dragged all my grubby, expensive clothes out of the bureau and the closet and spread them on the chairs and the bed and the floor and then sat and stared at them, utterly perplexed. They seemed to have a separate, mulish identity of their own that refused to be washed and folded and stowed.

I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

I needed experience. How Could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?

I am I because of that.

Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.