Sylvia Plath

“Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.”

“Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).”

“What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she...”

“My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.”

“Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled...”

“A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum...”

“I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bomb!' etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan...”

“But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.”

“Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.”

“Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, dri...”

“I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds...”

“Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art...”

“I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.”

“Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny hor...”

“I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.”

“We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develo...”