Sylvia Plath

“petaled blood Burns open to the sun’s blade.”

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”

“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.”

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfilment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”

“— I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do.”

“Let me come in and suck your life and sorrow from you like a leech sucks blood; let me gorge myself on your sensations and ideas and dreams; let me crawl inside your guts”

“My shut eyelids felt sun, and my nose smelled earth, and my skin felt warm wind. Eyes closed, body not yet mine, but still part of something – of air, of earth, of fire, of water –”

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

“It is a wet, warm, gray November day, and the yellow-green trees are letting go their leaves in the sodden wind.”

““Come here,” he said. “I’ll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.” Then it hit me and I just blurted, “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” He was definite. “Nobody knows me.” So that was it; the end. “Goodbye for good, then,” I said. He looked hard at me, a smile twisting his mouth. “You lucky kid; you don’t know how lucky you are.””

“… a hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing yet inside my head.”

“We grow. It hurts at first.”

​“Today is a lousy day. It is pouring wet cold unsentimental rain and the gray streets are puddled with it and the trees are slippery with it and my feet are muddy with it and the windows are splotched with it and my hair is damp with it and damn it all to hell anyway. There! I feel much better now.”