I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
Sylvia PlathPerhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
Sylvia PlathAnd I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
Sylvia PlathSometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.
Sylvia Plath