Sylvia Plath

“How frail the human heart must be —a mirrored pool of thought.”

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;I lift my lids and all is born again.”

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,”

“What did my fingers do before they held him?What did my heart do, with its love?”

“I am inhabited by a cry.”

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.”

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.”

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?”

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

“What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”

“In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'”

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.”

“Is it the sea you hear in me,”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;”

“I 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.”

“I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

“Does she know you love her?" "Of course." I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. "If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”

“They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.”

“My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.”

“Wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

“I hate her," I said, and waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much and said, "I suppose you do.”

“The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“I’m so pathetically intense. I just can’t be any other way.”

“How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

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

“I am terrified by this dark thing”

“There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”

“DyingI guess you could say I've a call.”

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.”

“You do not do, you do not doBarely daring to breathe or Achoo.”

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”

“There’s a stake in your fat black heartDaddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

“Darling, all nightThe sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.”

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

“The blood jet is poetry,There is no stopping it.”

“AxesOff from the centre like horses.”

“These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.Beating and beating at an intractable metal.”

“These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.”

“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”

“I'm a riddle in nine syllables,Boarded the train there's no getting off.”

“Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,”

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

“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.”

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.”

“The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.”

“Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.”

“If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.”

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”

“I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

“I am made, crudely, for success.”

“Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.”

“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“The abstract kills, the concrete saves.”

“I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”

“Stars open among the lilies.”

“Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.”

“I have a visual imagination.”

“LADY LAZARUS”

“How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?”

“I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.”

“Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.”

“Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.”

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

“My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.”

“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that "shaping" force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”

“I’ll never speak to God again.”

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.”

“If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.”

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

“Every woman adores a Fascist.”

“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

“But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”

“I am a victim of introspection.”

“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed”

“I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”

“I am not cruel —”

“How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.”

“The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water - blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be - were enough to watch.”

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.”

“LADY LAZARUS”

“I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bomb!' etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan, dusty marchers, knapsacks on their backs - Quakers and Catholics, Africans and whites, Algerians and French - 40 percent were London housewives.”

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.”

“Kiss me and you will see how important I am.”

“I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.”

“How we need another soul to cling to.”

“Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.”

“Today 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.'”

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

“My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.”

“There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.”

“That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.”

“The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark evenings closing in mid-afternoon, and will try to lay in some physical comforts these months - the best insurance against gloominess for me.”

“Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.”

“I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.”

“Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.”

“For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.”

“I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.”

“If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.”

“When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.”

“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”

“What I want back is what I was.”

“Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”

“Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.”

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

“Dying”

“For me, the real issues of our time are the issues of every time—the hurt and wonder of loving; making in all its forms—children, loaves of bread, paintings, buildings; and the conservation of life of all people in all places, the jeopardizing of which no abstract doubletalk of ‘peace’ or ‘implacable foes’ can excuse. ("Context", 1962)”

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.”

“Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.”

“I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.”

“The blood jet is poetry,”

“Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.”

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”

“A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.”

“I?”

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.”

“If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on 'Alice in Wonderland' and believing in magic for years and years.”

“I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.”

“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.”

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.”

“Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.”

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.”

“Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.”

“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”

“Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.”

“Love is a shadow.”

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

“I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.”

“There was a beautiful time...”

“I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.”

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

“I was my own woman.”

“I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.”

“I am too pure for you or anyone.”

“There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.”

“I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.”

“I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.”

“Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.”

“The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.”

“I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'”

“In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'”

“O love, how did you get here?”

“Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.”

“I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.”

“I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.”

“My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.”

“I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.”

“Mountains terrify me - they just sit about; they are so proud.”

“One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.”

“Coffee stains my skirts. Men stain my pride. Both leave hideous marks on what belongs to me.”

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted”

“I have a visual imagination.”

“My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen.”

“I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”

“I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.”

“Widow. The word consumes itself.”

“Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).”

“I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.”

“Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!”

“I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”

“We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.”

“There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job.”

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,”

“The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.”

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”

“I am terrified by this dark thing”

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”

“Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.”

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

“This is newness: every little tawdry”

“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.”