You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.
Sylvia PlathBut I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paperโฆIโฆIโฆIโฆIโฆIโฆI.
Sylvia PlathIf I have a dry spell ... I wait and live harder, eyes, ears, and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer.
Sylvia PlathIs to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add colorโitโs a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . Iโve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.
Sylvia Plath