Sylvia Plath

“I am not cruel — only truthful.”

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”

“I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”

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

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all thing...”

“Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it”

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I liv...”

“This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, w...”

“How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am j...”

“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 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 d...”

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive...”

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”

“I’ll never speak to God again.”

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.”

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks...”

“Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”