The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.
Sylvia PlathI am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
Sylvia PlathWe know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.
Sylvia PlathI wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
Sylvia PlathIf they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
Sylvia PlathI cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.
Sylvia PlathNo, 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.
Sylvia PlathAt twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.
Sylvia PlathIt won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.
Sylvia PlathYes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
Sylvia PlathSure, 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 so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.
Sylvia PlathTo annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
Sylvia PlathI hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.
Sylvia PlathWhen you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.
Sylvia PlathWith that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be.
Sylvia PlathI had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.
Sylvia PlathWhy honey, don't you want to get dressed?" My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon." I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.
Sylvia PlathI want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.
Sylvia PlathThe reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down.
Sylvia PlathI felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.
Sylvia PlathI believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini.
Sylvia PlathThen I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.
Sylvia PlathThere is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.
Sylvia PlathPiece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
Sylvia PlathYes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.
Sylvia PlathI felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
Sylvia PlathVery depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.
Sylvia PlathIf neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.
Sylvia PlathOn the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.
Sylvia Plath