Sylvia Plath Quotations | Page 5

... I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb ...

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.

So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead...

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady . . . I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain ... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good.

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality- She lay in bed with me like a dead body And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I couldn't sleep for a week she was so cold.

It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt)

You ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason?... I write only because there is a voice within me. That will not be still.

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.

I 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.

The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. 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.

I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

Very 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.

Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

we walk the plank with strangers.

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.

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

I guess they call it suicide, but I'm to full to swallow my pride I can't stand losing you The Police Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

Last year a friend went dark in a nervous city alone, the sea flashing against his glasses, the sea sorted out at last in his inner ear so he could leave this world as he'd entered it through the undependable irrational influence of water. -Kevin Jeffery Clark 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 at.

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.

I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

I am made, crudely, for success.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance.

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

The 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.

Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.

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.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.

What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

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.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.

I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.

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

Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen.

The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

The 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.

Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

The box is only temporary.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

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

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

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.)

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

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

I am myself. That is not enough.

Sure, 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.

I am what I feel and think and do.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

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

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

Your room is not your prison. You are.

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

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

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

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

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.