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16bdf05
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If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter - - - for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.... Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
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Sylvia Plath |
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11d63b0
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I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
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Sylvia Plath |
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2d4f062
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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 tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy of poppies. But when it came right down to it, the sink of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wa..
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suicide
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Sylvia Plath |
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937deb1
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How many different deaths I can die?
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Sylvia Plath |
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77f8a1b
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I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.
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Sylvia Plath |
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55d398d
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To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
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Sylvia Plath |
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e82a7b8
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God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?
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Sylvia Plath |
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e5f5a79
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I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.
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Sylvia Plath |
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01460db
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Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.
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Sylvia Plath |
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93c49ad
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I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
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Sylvia Plath |
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f01a459
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I wait and ache.
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three-women
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Sylvia Plath |
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85ffdac
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Not being perfect hurts.
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Sylvia Plath |
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f9c1348
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No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.
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Sylvia Plath |
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13518d9
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A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.
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Sylvia Plath |
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af07c5c
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I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ace3411
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I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more
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floor
still
safe
sylvia-plath
summer
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Sylvia Plath |
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332946e
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If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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1c7fee4
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I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.
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Sylvia Plath |
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8c9bf21
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Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
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Sylvia Plath |
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7436ec0
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You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...
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Sylvia Plath |
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95cf715
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I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
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Sylvia Plath |
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63e11b8
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I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.
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Sylvia Plath |
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b89daed
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The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.
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Sylvia Plath |
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bbd1987
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She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.
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reflection
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Sylvia Plath |
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99f5d82
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I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.
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Sylvia Plath |
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05dd77f
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I fancied you'd return the way you said,
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Sylvia Plath |
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fa366c5
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The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.
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Sylvia Plath |
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06af433
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Sure, I'm dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and..
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Sylvia Plath |
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9367898
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I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.
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Sylvia Plath |
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9500af4
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'It always has to end, doesn't it? We always have to separate.' 'Yes,' I said. He was insistent, 'But it doesn't always have to be that way. We could be together some day for always.' 'Oh, no,' I told him, wondering if he knew it was all over. 'We keep running till we die. We separate, get further apart, till we are dead.
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Sylvia Plath |
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467f3b4
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I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
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fear
hope
love
the-bell-jar
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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8aceac0
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A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ea05145
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But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."
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Sylvia Plath |
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a79f2dd
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Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
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depression
sadness
the-bell-jar
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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400b0ee
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A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ec2bcf6
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If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
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Sylvia Plath |
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1195e22
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If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?
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man
love
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Sylvia Plath |
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8a7f0ac
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I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
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depression
contrary
manic-depression
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Sylvia Plath |
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3a89550
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Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.
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Sylvia Plath |
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82c1988
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And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-..
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Sylvia Plath |
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fffd000
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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.
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Sylvia Plath |
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770b944
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I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.
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Sylvia Plath |
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d37df44
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I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming "Traitor, sinner, imposter."
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self-doubt
sadness
negativism
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Sylvia Plath |
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467f283
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What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit's cry may be wilder But it has no soul.
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motherhood
rabbit
cry
children
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Sylvia Plath |