4441d6b
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I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
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page-147
the-bell-jar
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
06c16fb
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The day I went into physics class it was death.
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Sylvia Plath |
33f3169
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Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.
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Sylvia Plath |
81b5343
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Wind warns November's done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.
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bats
dialogue-over-a-ouija-board
ouija
foliage
leaves
november
bat
fall
wind
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Sylvia Plath |
e2bb68e
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I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
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Sylvia Plath |
8303bc5
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The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.
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Sylvia Plath |
f16430e
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I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
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Sylvia Plath |
9bb3801
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It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.
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Sylvia Plath |
984d3f9
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You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.
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magic
dreams
disillusionment
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Sylvia Plath |
301a960
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My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her rid..
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Sylvia Plath |
d9c6898
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to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment...
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Sylvia Plath |
3caa5f6
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Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death -- mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.
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Sylvia Plath |
8d9ba92
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But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
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poetry
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Sylvia Plath |
5316d4e
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Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
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Sylvia Plath |
f68f185
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to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.
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Sylvia Plath |
2adeac4
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I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.
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Sylvia Plath |
78c3685
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The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.
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Sylvia Plath |
657f92a
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So I am led to one or two choices! Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I'm any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH, EGOCENTRIC, JEALOUS, AND UNIMAGINATIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTHWHILE? Should I sublimate (my how we throw words around!) my selfishness in serving other people- through social or other such work? Would I then become more sensitive to other people..
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Sylvia Plath |
167f558
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The future is what matters -- because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present -- like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.
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future
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Sylvia Plath |
03abd4a
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Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.
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Sylvia Plath |
8edb34a
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The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven -- and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive -- nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.
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death
human-mind
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Sylvia Plath |
adb855f
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I self-paralyze myself & wonder what I've got in my head.
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Sylvia Plath |
ed2b7c5
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Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.
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Sylvia Plath |
61152d3
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I hated to serve men in any way.
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Sylvia Plath |
442f92d
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If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll e flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
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Sylvia Plath |
c809f13
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Tomorrow is another day toward death.
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Sylvia Plath |
574c80a
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The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.
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Sylvia Plath |
c78e117
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Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!
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Sylvia Plath |
85dd6ff
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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. The reason I hadn't washed my clo..
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Sylvia Plath |
150c0ea
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I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
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Sylvia Plath |
e8c83df
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There is more than one good way to drown.
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Sylvia Plath |
dd31494
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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 why 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 and ..
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Sylvia Plath |
9dc3464
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Shut up in public those bloody private wounds.
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Sylvia Plath |
aa8b93d
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It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
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Sylvia Plath |
ce754c6
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My mother smiled. "I know my baby wasn't like that." I looked at her. "Like what?" "Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again."
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Sylvia Plath |
acadd08
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A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin. I was sitting out on the steps today, uneasy with fear and discontent. Peter, (the little boy-across-the-street) with the pointed pale face, the grave blue eyes and the slow fragile smile came bringing his adorable sister Libby of the flaxen braids and the firm, lyrically-formed child-body. They stood shyly f..
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Sylvia Plath |
ef6e5e8
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When am I going to see you?" "Do you really want to know?" "Very much." "Never," I said, and hung up with a resolute click."
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Sylvia Plath |
b1ed22b
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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.
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Sylvia Plath |
7dfe776
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I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
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travel
depression
stagnent
the-bell-jar
stale
sour
guilt
mental-health
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Sylvia Plath |
37f3d23
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If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.
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Sylvia Plath |
9b68895
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How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?
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Sylvia Plath |
f14b0e3
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The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
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poetry
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Sylvia Plath |
bd6acf0
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What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.
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Sylvia Plath |
2889486
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Reality is what I make it. That is what I have said I believed. Then I look at the hell I am wallowing in, nerves paralyzed, action nullified - fear, envy, hate: all the corrosive emotions of insecurity biting away at my sensitive guts. Time, experience: the colossal wave, sweeping tidal over me, drowning, drowning. How can I ever find that permanence, that continuity with past and future, that communication with other human beings that I c..
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Sylvia Plath |