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d5628cc
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I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3715ee3
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I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists
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Sylvia Plath |
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dd44b7a
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Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.
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Sylvia Plath |
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02782c5
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I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful- The eye of the little god, four cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over. Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me..
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Sylvia Plath |
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59a358a
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I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.
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Sylvia Plath |
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441c662
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What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
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marriage
men
women
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Sylvia Plath |
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873a62a
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DADDY You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic When it pours bean green over blue In the waters of beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover yo..
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onomatopoeia
prose
rhythm
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Sylvia Plath |
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657726a
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Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person
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Sylvia Plath |
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95ee039
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Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.
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Sylvia Plath |
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857be88
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Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak.
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Sylvia Plath |
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81bcd39
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I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.
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Sylvia Plath |
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7809186
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Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a gir..
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feminism
feminism-woman-submission
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Sylvia Plath |
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3d8fb27
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There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.
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Sylvia Plath |
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1e5ff2a
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All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
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Sylvia Plath |
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8a46c89
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Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
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indiviuality
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Sylvia Plath |
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169cf7d
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I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
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indecision
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Sylvia Plath |
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f2b4c78
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In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ffef677
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And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat...I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think mayb..
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Sylvia Plath |
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6027dea
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Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.
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Sylvia Plath |
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56de08d
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The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.
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Sylvia Plath |
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411d424
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I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
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life
road
nineteen
years
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Sylvia Plath |
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d55528e
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And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.
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Sylvia Plath |
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6edd324
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There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustome..
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understanding
restlessness
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Sylvia Plath |
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02d5ae2
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I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
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Sylvia Plath |
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71a8fd6
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I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.
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loneliness
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Sylvia Plath |
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c5824eb
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And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.
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Sylvia Plath |
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5402042
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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. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
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Sylvia Plath |
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c392f38
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I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translati..
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Sylvia Plath |
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affbfa1
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That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said."
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the-bell-jar
roses
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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1cda963
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We'll act as if all this were a bad dream." A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything. I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gai..
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Sylvia Plath |
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cd23325
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I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
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change
inspirational
excitement
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Sylvia Plath |
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9f35528
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I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
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poetry
love
yearning
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Sylvia Plath |
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895b20f
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I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, b..
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Sylvia Plath |
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6fd3d14
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When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.
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Sylvia Plath |
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d6dbdd7
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I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3a23574
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I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this. Sick with conflict, des..
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Sylvia Plath |
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cd9707e
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What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And what do I want? 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. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind, an..
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Sylvia Plath |
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af49e17
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It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
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the-bella-jar
plath
fallen
sylvia
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Sylvia Plath |
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24f0748
|
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath."
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Sylvia Plath |
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9eece8d
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Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
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Sylvia Plath |
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50ab3f2
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I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.
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holidays
disappointment
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Sylvia Plath |
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d40354a
|
I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3c7faa7
|
I woke to the sound of rain.
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rain
subtle
simple
|
Sylvia Plath |
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967d824
|
Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?
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Sylvia Plath |