01UndatedWriting, 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.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
02UndatedI am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
03UndatedI am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
06UndatedThe 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 quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
07UndatedThis is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
08UndatedI dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
10Undatedbrave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
11UndatedThe still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
12UndatedAlthough, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burning tookPossession of the most obtuse objects now and then --Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
13UndatedAnd by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
15UndatedSome things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
16UndatedI want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
17UndatedFeel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
18UndatedI don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
19UndatedAll, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
20UndatedAnd then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
22UndatedI wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
23UndatedAmazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
