Sylvia Plath: Trending quotes (page 6)

“I don't know how long I kept at it…
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”

“If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.”

“Not being perfect hurts.”

“I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.”

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”

“I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say "fine”

“… it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because 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 act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?”

“God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?”

“Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.”

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

“I am myself. That is not enough.”

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962”

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

“My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.”

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

“There was a beautiful time…”

“I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.”

“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”