Sylvia Plath

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

"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."

"let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences"

"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."

"“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.”"

"“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 have a call.”"

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."

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

"I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything."

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

"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."

"“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”"

"Oh what a poet I will flay myself into."

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? 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."

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

"I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy."

"Lorelei It is no night to drown in:A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping,The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes float Up toward me, troubling the face Of quiet. From the nadir They rise, their limbs ponderous With richness, hair heavier Than sculptured marble. They sing Of a world more full and clear Than can be. Sisters, your song Bears a burden too weighty For the whorled ear's listening Here, in a well-steered country,Under a balanced ruler. Deranging by harmony Beyond the mundane order,Your voices lay siege. You lodge On the pitched reefs of nightmare,Promising sure harborage;By day, descant from borders Of hebetude, from the ledge Also of high windows. Worse Even than your maddening Song, your silence. At the source Of your ice-hearted calling-Drunkenness of the great depths. O river, I see drifting Deep in your flux of silver Those great goddesses of peace. Stone, stone, ferry me down there."

"Ennui Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer. Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd. The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger."

"I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in."

"I fancied you'd return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song"