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0fc74c9
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I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway..
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Sylvia Plath |
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bcb3770
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And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.
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Sylvia Plath |
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c808280
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I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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83952e6
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I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.
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Sylvia Plath |
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15701a1
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And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.
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Sylvia Plath |
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37933ca
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I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again.
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Sylvia Plath |
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a62a2a6
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People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.
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Sylvia Plath |
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bfb57c6
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My heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.
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Sylvia Plath |
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628afa7
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brave love, dream
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passion
poetry
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Sylvia Plath |
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5ef59af
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I felt myself shrink to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.
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Sylvia Plath |
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b7bf44d
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We all like to think that we are important enough to need psychiatrists.
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Sylvia Plath |
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5df60fd
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I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.
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Sylvia Plath |
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55b934a
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I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.
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magnificence
mystery
new-york
solitude
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Sylvia Plath |
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b7ead06
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God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental pre..
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Sylvia Plath |
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35203b3
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The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ae60bba
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So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon... I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9e0e65c
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I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3b39024
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daddy daddy you bastard, i'm through
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Sylvia Plath |
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4f3ca62
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She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.
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Sylvia Plath |
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1175254
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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 thermometer and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and se..
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Sylvia Plath |
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bef08c0
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My mother smiled. "I knew 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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decision
depression
hospital
mental-health
mental-health-stigma
stigma
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Sylvia Plath |
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a3463b1
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I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.
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Sylvia Plath |
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a0c60cf
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Love Letter" Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, then I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it, Staying put according to habit. You didn't just tow me an inch, no- Nor leave me to set my small bald eye Skyward again, without hope, of course, Of apprehending blueness, or stars. That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake Masked among black rocks as a black rock In the white hiatus of winter- Like my neighbors, taking..
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Sylvia Plath |
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c76b49a
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The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the day of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed si..
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Sylvia Plath |
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86268a8
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I wondered at what point in space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.
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Sylvia Plath |
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55b7a5a
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Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue
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Sylvia Plath |
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edc7fe7
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A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, its a poultice. You have an eye, its an image. My boy, its your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9bb4c11
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I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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dd71b39
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Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure.
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hot-bath
the-bell-jar
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sylvia plath |
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8597ab7
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I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9aaa70e
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A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.
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psychiatry
psychology
spirituality
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Sylvia Plath |
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e418a37
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It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual...
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Sylvia Plath |
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f7672da
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Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
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Sylvia Plath |
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79a76cf
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I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.
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Sylvia Plath |
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1d5a947
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Neurotic, ha!" I let out a scornful laugh. "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
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Sylvia Plath |
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f206968
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But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
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the-bell-jar
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Sylvia Plath |
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99438e1
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if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?
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journals
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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e797ed7
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I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.
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Sylvia Plath |
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a50dfd0
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Can nothingness be so prodigal?
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Sylvia Plath |
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be74bc8
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All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.
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education
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Sylvia Plath |
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aac0f69
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I'm so jealous I can't speak.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3030db1
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I saw their mouths going up and down without a sound, as if they were sitting on the deck of a departing ship, stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3b89e0d
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Already she feels jaded. Weary, and gladly tired and old.
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Sylvia Plath |
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2ac04ce
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I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him
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Sylvia Plath |