Sylvia Plath: Likeness

“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 know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.”

“Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”

“They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

“I like people too much or not at all.”

“Opinions are like orgasms… mine matters most and I really don’t care if you have one.”

“The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.”

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

“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?”

“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them."

()”

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

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

“I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”

“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.”

“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”

“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.”

“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”

“I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”