Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new

Not this troublous Wringing of hands, this dark Ceiling without a star.

And yet I feel that sleep somehow

The only quiet woman is a dead one

now comes before all else: there is much to bear, and I must be strong and rested to be brave enough.

got depressed with the ending on Tuesday: four pages of anti-climactic question and answer between Doctor and Sara, dry and chopped logical as an adding machine: now, you've decided this, how do you feel about that. Bad as a rich involved poem with a bare flat two-line moral tacked on the end: this is the truth kiddies

Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.

A real self, as we know, is a rare thing. The direct speech of a real self is rarer still. Where a real self exists it reveals itself, as a rule, only in the quality of the person's presence, or in actions

I am in black, dressed more and more often in black now.

Then next week. Next week it all slows, rides easy under apple boughs.

memory throws a kind of halo around him.

shall pick up Bergson, or Kafka, or Joyce, and languish for the minds that are outleaping and outskipping mine.

On a wonderful thing—Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, And a naked mouth, red and awkward. For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

and in bed in bed in bed.

See each scene deep, love it like a complex faceted jewel. Get the light, shadow & vivid color. Set scene the night before. Sleep on it, write it in the morning.

I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately. The Novel got to be such a big idea, I got panicked.

Myself the rose you achieve--- This body, This ivory Ungodly as a child's shriek. Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image, Uttering nothing but blood--- Taste it, dark red!

Eager always still for the promising future which, even if twenty years are gone, is not the final word, nor the stiffening of old uncreative age. Always the promise, the hope, the dream, amid whatever poverty, war, disease and adversity – always persists the credulous human vision, of something better than that which is.

And they have condemned you for being mad. Just like that. Because the fear is already there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and "suddenly go out" the way the moon would in the Blake poem.

it is something even to live through hours of obligation now, without screaming: gently, gently, stoic one.

How can I go, meeting and exorcising my own ghosts here! I've made some new ones now.

with girls (house bristles with suspicion and frigidity; how much is paranoia transference? the damnable thing is that they can sense insecurity and meaness like animals smell blood)

whole emphasis has swung again, to a realization that if I enter this academic, critical world, I'll spend all my time reading and reading, and that I need a healthy overturning of the apple-cart, almost a refusal to read beyond a point, and to read more of what influences my writing, rather

think in chapters, stories, fight through to triumph