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Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
Sylvia Plath
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I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Sylvia Plath
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And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
Sylvia Plath
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In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia Plath
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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?
Sylvia Plath
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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.
Sylvia Plath
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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
Sylvia Plath
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The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
Sylvia Plath
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The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
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It's incredible to think that carpets can create a state of mind, but I am so suggestible to colors and textures that I'm sure a red carpet would keep me forever optimistic.
Sylvia Plath
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I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.
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The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
Sylvia Plath
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There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
Sylvia Plath
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They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
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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.
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Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.
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I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.
Sylvia Plath
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I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!
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Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending.
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Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man...
Sylvia Plath
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The terrible wind tries his breathing. The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.
Sylvia Plath
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In spite of everything, I still have my good old sense of humor.
Sylvia Plath
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The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.
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We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.
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I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
Sylvia Plath
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Sylvia Plath
Born:
October 27, 1932
Died:
February 11, 1963
(aged 30)
Bio:
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer.
Known for:
The Bell Jar (1963)
Journals of Sylvia Plath
Ariel
The Collected Poems
The Colossus and Other Poems (1957)
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