Sylvia Plath

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.”

“I am jealous of men. I envy the man his physical freedom to lead a double life.”

“How frail the human heart must be —a mirrored pool of thought.”

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;I lift my lids and all is born again.”

“What did my fingers do before they held him?What did my heart do, with its love?”

“So many of us!So many of us!We are shelves, we areTables, we are meek,We are edible,Nudgers and shoversIn spite of ourselves.Our kind multiplies:We shall by morningInherit the earth.Our foot's in the door.”

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”

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

“I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.”

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

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

“Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”

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

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

“I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.”

“"Does she know you love her?" "Of course." I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. "If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday."”

“They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.”

“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 hate her," I said, and waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much and said, "I suppose you do."”

“The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”

“There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”

“DyingIs 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.”

“Herr God, Herr Lucifer,Beware.Beware.Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.”

“I am inhabited by a cry.Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”