Quotes from Sylvia Plath

It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

In life, love gnawed my skin To this white bone; What love did then, love does now: Gnaws me through.

Try to get into a story. Forget self and give blood to creation.

I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.

Listen and shut up, oh, ye of little faith.

My enemies are those who care about me most.

Each of these magic seven weeks: writing: not the novel yet, until I'm warmed up.

You know, he says, you have met a lot of boys like me and I have never before met any body like you. You've got it. What have I got? I don't know. You've just got it.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.

I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when i feel nothing, I feel it completely.

And round her house she set Such a barricade of barb and check Against mutinous weather As no mere insurgent man could hope to break With curse, fist, threat Or love, either.

As long as men have ideals, as long as they are vulnerable, there is this power to create a dream for them.

I wasn't steering anything, not even myself

I long for a noble escape from freedom

apologized for smell of child's urine pot, which he held up, covered, said she'd been sick. Rooted

And another: perhaps a version of the waitress story: only I haven't got it here. Make it up. Naturalistic. Jewel prose. Make out little paragraphs of what happens to whom. Then think it clear. Write it.

You have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something.

i have so many books i am perishing to read in my bookcase. hours-and-hours-and-hours- and hours.

And if I have learned nothing else, it is to listen and to love: everyone.

Just then, a tinkling, and the flock of black and gray aristocratic goats rounded the wall of the corral with the little leprechaun of a blue-eyed milkman, in patched faded dungarees, rope sandals, and sombrero; he looked happy and pleasant; let us come into corral; new world; his world. Goats at home in bare, neat yard, drank out of water pails; black and white spotted kid. Two goats butted; one rising on hillock as if strung up from neck, poised, hung, butting down on other; playing.

I love my rejections. They prove that I'm trying'. I'm convinced this quote from Sylvia Plath is one of the best incentives to keep a struggling writer from giving up.

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing. Or is it an excuse for wanting to be alone and meditate alone, not having to brave a group of women? (Women in numbers has always disturbed me.)

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear.

Goats butting again; milkman whirled, dropping stone in dead center, breaking up struggle; clucked and shooshed goats into shack: "their little house." We followed him in;