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ed4b767
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So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor -- you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, poss..
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Sylvia Plath |
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d63103b
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I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9ff4aeb
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I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.
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Sylvia Plath |
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eaf26ea
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I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
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Sylvia Plath |
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279bdd4
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I've been wondering. . . I mean, I thought you might be able to tell me something." Buddy met my eyes and I saw, for the first time, how he had changed. Instead of the old, sure smile that flashed on easily and frequently as a photographer's bulb, his face was grave, even tentative -- the face of a man who often does not get what he wants."
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Sylvia Plath |
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e31e321
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The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
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inadequacy
growing-up
fear-of-failure
school
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Sylvia Plath |
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23a40be
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I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.
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Sylvia Plath |
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0056dac
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I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. I thought I would spend the summer reading "Finnegan's Wake" and writing my thesis. Then I would be way ahead when college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead of swotting away with no make up and stringy hair, on a diet..
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wandering-thoughts
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Sylvia Plath |
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fd4482d
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I knew something was wrong with me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid I'd been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ee92b8b
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Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.
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Sylvia Plath |
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29bbbe5
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The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.
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liver
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Sylvia Plath |
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881e857
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Why do my beheld beauties vanish and deform themselves as soon as I look twice.
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Sylvia Plath |
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0b18a53
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I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
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water
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Sylvia Plath |
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5e260e5
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What is it that teaching kills? The juice, the sap - the substance of revelation: by making even the insoluble questions & multiple possible answers take on the granite assured stance of dogma. It does not kill this quick of life in students who come, each year, fresh, quick, to be awakened & pass on - but it kills the quick in me by forcing to formula the great visions, the great collocations and cadences of words and meanings. The good te..
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Sylvia Plath |
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df0d6ac
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Yet I liked him too much... way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn't get to hurt me more than it did.
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Sylvia Plath |
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5bb2400
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Water will run by rule; the actual sun / Will scrupulously rise and set; / No little man lives in the exacting moon / And that is that, is that, is that.
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Sylvia Plath |
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66bfd6d
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O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. From the poem "Cut", 24 October 1962"
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Sylvia Plath |
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e19bc09
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What a man wants is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
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Sylvia Plath |
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77fb7df
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I cry at everything. Simply to spite myself and embarrass myself.
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Sylvia Plath |
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208a190
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A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache.
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sylvia plath |
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8c5b09c
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They might ignore me immediately. In my moon suit and funeral veil. I am no source of honey So why should they turn on me? Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
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the-arrival-of-the-bee-box
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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9f096fd
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I liked looking at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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d77d269
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Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3f172b4
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I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.
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school
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Sylvia Plath |
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faec884
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I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.
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Sylvia Plath |
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6594de9
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The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, "I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound," which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast."
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Sylvia Plath |
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9be807c
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It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain ... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.
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Sylvia Plath |
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f451436
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Life happens so hard and fast I sometimes wonder who is me...
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selfhood
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Sylvia Plath |
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589bd7a
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To feel the tender skin of sensitive child-fingers thicken; to feel the sex organs develop and call loudly to the flesh; to become aware of school, exams (the very words as unlovely as the sound of chalk shrilling on the blackboard,) bread and butter, marriage, sex, compatibility, war, economics, death and self. What a pathetic blighting of the beauty and reality of childhood.
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Sylvia Plath |
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acc6c21
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There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart---- It really goes.
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Sylvia Plath |
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c1623b5
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Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.
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Sylvia Plath |
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c3ba3e8
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We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.
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Sylvia Plath |
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cc982fc
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I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.
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Sylvia Plath |
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16c2140
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Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9f7b4c3
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I was a terrible dancer. I couldn't carry a tune. I had no sense of balance, and when we had to walk down a narrow board with our hands out and a book on our heads in gym class I always fell over. I couldn't ride a horse or ski, the two things I wanted to do most, because they cost too much money. I couldn't speak German or read Hebrew or write Chinese. I didn't even know where most of the old out-of-the-way countries the UN men in front of..
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Sylvia Plath |
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72c2b68
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How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off? How long can I be Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand, Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon? The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow Lap at my back ineluctably. How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?
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loneliness
sorrow
poetry
strength
fortitude
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Sylvia Plath |
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947c342
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I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple 'lucky stones' I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel's fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath.
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Sylvia Plath |
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2111715
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I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.
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Sylvia Plath |
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888776d
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He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn't. He had what no American man I've ever met has had, and that's intuition.
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Sylvia Plath |
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266f11f
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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...
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Sylvia Plath |
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fbdc610
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She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odours bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone.
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sylvia-plath
edge
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Sylvia Plath |
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186cc66
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mr'@un mbtsm@ 'n lm 'zl fy lthlthyn wldyW mthl lqT@ ts` mrWt l'mwt. lmwt fnW `l~ Grr kl m `dh wny 'mrsh btqn 'mrsh Ht~ ybdw jhnWm 'mrsh Ht~ ybdw Hqyq@ fy ws`km lqwl nh d`wty. lkn hnk thmn lky 'tjss `l~ ndwby lky 'SGy l~ nbDt qlby - ah, nh ydqW Hq! whnk thmn, thmn bhZ jdan lkl klm@, lkl lms@ lbD` nqT mn dmy
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Sylvia Plath |
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f5a8a0c
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After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.
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Sylvia Plath |
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cd8deaa
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The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night f..
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Sylvia Plath |