Sylvia Plath: Doing

“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 wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

“At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.”

“I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. 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.”

“Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.”

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

“I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.”

“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”

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.”

“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.”

“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 did my arms do before they held you?”

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”

“I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”

“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”

“I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”

“I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.”

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