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01324f9
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I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)
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poetry
reality
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Sylvia Plath |
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5414cb1
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The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.
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Sylvia Plath |
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0fab96b
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The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.
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Sylvia Plath |
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38afa40
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The blood jet is poetry There is no stopping it.
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poetry
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Sylvia Plath |
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c81da9e
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I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.
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Sylvia Plath |
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a2a6bbe
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I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.
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Sylvia Plath |
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c2225a5
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Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
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Sylvia Plath |
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3fad358
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I collected men with interesting names.
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Sylvia Plath |
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f81e1c0
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Elm BY SYLVIA PLATH I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little t..
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Sylvia Plath |
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e2bcb71
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When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
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future
the-bell-jar
grow-up
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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ee00d99
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Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.
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silence
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Sylvia Plath |
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e697ed7
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I was my own woman
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inspirational
women-s-strength
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Sylvia Plath |
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e7dc776
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I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality -- She lay in bed with me like a dead body And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I coul..
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Sylvia Plath |
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bead42a
|
we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
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Sylvia Plath |
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82bfab6
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I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.
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women-s-strength
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Sylvia Plath |
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0ad1244
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I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
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Sylvia Plath |
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0f98257
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I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.
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Sylvia Plath |
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aff4cbf
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I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my..
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Sylvia Plath |
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594a948
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Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
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Sylvia Plath |
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4b49851
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It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would ..
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Sylvia Plath |
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4ad52d4
|
O love, how did you get here? --Nick and the Candlestick
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poetry
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Sylvia Plath |
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63c65f4
|
I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say "fine"
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Sylvia Plath |
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cf62ea0
|
There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter -- they ..
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Sylvia Plath |
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50fc117
|
And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9ada69b
|
It never occurred to me to say no.
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Sylvia Plath |
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2d74f4c
|
it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at 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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the-bell-jar
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Sylvia Plath |
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9d19577
|
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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dad0242
|
I hurl my heart to halt his pace.
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Sylvia Plath |
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33ebe52
|
I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, 'Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?
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Sylvia Plath |
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c64efca
|
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.
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Sylvia Plath |
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c6311be
|
What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the ..
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the-bell-jar
sylvia
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Sylvia Plath |
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d92477d
|
My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.
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Sylvia Plath |
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e6b1dac
|
His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn't want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over. The Tide ebbed, sucked ba..
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Sylvia Plath |
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451c4d5
|
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. --From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962"
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Sylvia Plath |
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0ca29e2
|
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
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stars
light
poetry
night
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Sylvia Plath |
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cc4e76e
|
And I, love, am a pathological liar.
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Sylvia Plath |
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e8ddb30
|
I am I am I am.
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Sylvia Plath |
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034857a
|
Ash, ash --- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. --From the poem Lady Lazarus
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Sylvia Plath |
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7eada63
|
Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9c2663b
|
God, who am I?
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Sylvia Plath |
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7404189
|
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
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poems
writer
poetry
writing
plath
journals
sylvia-plath
poet
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Sylvia Plath |
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8c750fd
|
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.
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Sylvia Plath |
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b56aea4
|
I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.
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Sylvia Plath |
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85001f7
|
I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free---- The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
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religion
peace
|
Sylvia Plath |