It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.
Sylvia PlathI felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.
Sylvia PlathI need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.
Sylvia PlathI'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.
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 PlathThe thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.
Sylvia PlathMasks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.
Sylvia PlathI 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.
Sylvia PlathSo learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.
Sylvia PlathBut when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.
Sylvia PlathI 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.
Sylvia PlathI have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.
Sylvia PlathI think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!
Sylvia PlathI need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak.
Sylvia PlathThe only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
Sylvia PlathSunday-the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.
Sylvia PlathI shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. 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.)
Sylvia PlathThe trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
Sylvia PlathI 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
Sylvia PlathAs I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.
Sylvia PlathI feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.
Sylvia PlathToday 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.
Sylvia PlathAnd if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.
Sylvia PlathSo you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!
Sylvia PlathI am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
Sylvia PlathIt's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
Sylvia PlathThe sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.
Sylvia PlathThe future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.
Sylvia PlathTo learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.
Sylvia PlathI don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.
Sylvia PlathThere must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
Sylvia PlathWhen I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.
Sylvia Plath