Quotes from Sylvia Plath

El silencio me deprimía. No era realmente el silencio. Era mi propio silencio.

I hated the idea of serving men in any way.

He always arranged our weekends so we'd never regret wasting our time in any way.

Donde quiera que estuviera sentada estaría sentada bajo la misma campana de cristal, agitándome en mi propio aire viciado

She had just smiled and said what a merciful thing it was for him he had died, because if he had lived he would have been crippled and an invalid for life, and he couldn't have stood that, he would rather have died than had that happen.

eram propria mea femeie.

How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumey, spiritous mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

But these seniors said most boys were like that and you couldn't honestly accuse them of anything until you were at least pinned or engaged to be married.

Then I knew what the trouble was. 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? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

Cómo podría yo saber si algún día en la universidad, en Europa, en algún lugar, en cualquier lugar, la campana de cristal con sus asfixiantes distorsiones, no volvería a descender?

I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. 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.

I told Buddy how sorry I was about the TB and promised to write, but when I hung up I didn't feel one bit sorry. I only felt a wonderful relief.

towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby.

if neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then i'm neurotic as all hell

Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibilityto be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

I hadn't slept for seven nights. My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.

All night I carpenter A space for the thing I am given, A love Of two wet eyes and a screech. White spit  Of indifference! The dark fruits revolve and fall. The glass cracks across, The image Flees and aborts like dropped mercury 

I gathered all my news of Joan into a little, bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.

What I decided to do in the end was to lie in bed as long as I wanted to and then go to Central park and spend the day long in the grass, the longest grass I could find in that bald, duck-ponded wilderness.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

I never really liked Buddy Willard. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew everything about women...

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was