Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plathwas one of the most renowned and influential poets, novelists, and short story writers of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She was married to fellow poet Ted Hughes from 1956 until they separated in September of 1962. They lived together in the United States and then the United Kingdom and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth27 October 1932
CountryUnited States of America
A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.
Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness
There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.
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. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...