Sylvia Plath citations

Page 5

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

“There was a beautiful time…”

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

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

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

“I am myself. That is not enough.”

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

“How many different deaths I can die?”

“… 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?”

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

“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 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.”

“I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”

“Not being perfect hurts.”

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

“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”

“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.”

“It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.”

“I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.”

“I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”

“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?”

“If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.”

“…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.”

“I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.”

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

“I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.”

“Talking about my fears to others feeds it.”