Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 4

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast andcoffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon's celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look's leashDangles the puppet-peopleWho, unaware how they dwindle,Laugh, kiss, get drunk,Nor guess that if I choose to blinkThey die.IWhen in good humour,Give grass its greenBlazon sky blue, and endow the sunWith gold;Yet, in my wintriest moods, I holdAbsolute powerTo boycott color and forbid any flowerTo be.IKnow you appearVivid at my side,Denying you sprang out of my head,Claiming you feelLove fiery enough to prove flesh real,Though it's quite clearAll your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,From me."Soliloquy of the Solipsist", 1956

How we need another soul to cling to.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

There was a beautiful time...

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

Yes, 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...

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.A bad dream. I remembered everything.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.

Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.