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58317c0
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Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.
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Sylvia Plath |
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cffbd93
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I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ff924c8
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It's like watching paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.
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Sylvia Plath |
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fc51f2d
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I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.
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Sylvia Plath |
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32c583c
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When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.
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Sylvia Plath |
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f3ccffe
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You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.
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Sylvia Plath |
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15c2090
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God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.
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Sylvia Plath |
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4139a02
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Talking about my fears to others feeds it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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76af4a6
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Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
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Sylvia Plath |
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4760ea9
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The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
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Sylvia Plath |
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ceaf0bc
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So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.
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Sylvia Plath |
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bd79a20
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Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?
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poetry
heart
love
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Sylvia Plath |
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57b004f
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I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying "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 I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and ..
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Sylvia Plath |
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4515ea9
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If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.
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Sylvia Plath |
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678c440
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I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
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the-bell-jar
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Sylvia Plath |
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d8bdd1d
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I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.
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Sylvia Plath |
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a6b7590
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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.' I meditate in the bath.The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water's up to ..
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hot-baths
bathtub
tub
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Sylvia Plath |
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bb2acdb
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I'm never going to get married." "You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind." "No. My mind's made up."
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the-bella-jar
married
sylvia-plath
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Sylvia Plath |
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a11e99c
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I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the
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Sylvia Plath |
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ed5e88b
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I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks."
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Sylvia Plath |
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813c16a
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You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
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Sylvia Plath |
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ed60ca8
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Why do you make our case (which is hell enough, and we have enough to test us in these coming cruel years) so utterly and absolutely rigid? I can take the even harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near.
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Sylvia Plath |
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d978c1c
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I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it. Now everything seems either far and sad and cold, like a piece of shale at the bottom of a..
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Sylvia Plath |
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b0f580b
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I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.
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Sylvia Plath |
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58cc8d8
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I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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8030678
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What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?
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men
murder
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Sylvia Plath |
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21468f9
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The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels, Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels Begin on tilted violins to span The whole revolving tall glass palace hall Where guests slide gliding into light like wine; Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall Reflecting in a million flagons' shine, And glided couples all in whirling trance Follow holiday revel begun long since, Until near twelve the strange..
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Sylvia Plath |
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2d49a10
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Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing -- singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone,..
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time-management
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Sylvia Plath |
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44abb10
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God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.
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Sylvia Plath |
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1fc324c
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Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
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Sylvia Plath |
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5dcd13d
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The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
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Sylvia Plath |
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7c03816
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I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
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Sylvia Plath |
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7c2da2a
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To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
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Sylvia Plath |
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5054bd6
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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 after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man off 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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0b9c48b
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Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
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Sylvia Plath |
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edf6418
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I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.
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Sylvia Plath |
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f1bdd1e
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Worse even than your maddening song, your silence." -"
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Sylvia Plath |
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7acba52
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You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again. Let there be continuity at least - a core of consistency - even if your philosophy must be always a moving dynamic dialectic. The thes..
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Sylvia Plath |
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af6f8fc
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Ennui Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe, designing futures where nothing will occur: cross the gypsy's palm and yawning she will still predict no perils left to conquer. Jeopardy is jejune now: naive knight finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard of, while blase princesses indict tilts at terror as downright absurd. The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump, compelling hero's dull career to crisis; and when insouciant ange..
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poems
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Sylvia Plath |
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3d31ba5
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I am made, crudely, for success.
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yoel-goldenberg
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Sylvia Plath |
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f4f0e5e
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I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.
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Sylvia Plath |
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986d851
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shyd ykh rwz ykh nfr
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Sylvia Plath |
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fc44fab
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With me, the present is forever and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand...hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some gi..
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Sylvia Plath |
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95252a2
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I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.
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Sylvia Plath |