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
Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.
I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little.
If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.
And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
...I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature.- The Bell Jar
I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.'
Tree and Stone glittered, without shadows.My finger-length grew lucent as glass.I started to bud like a March twig:An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
One soul passes through the other, frail as smokeAnd utterly ignorant of the way it took.
I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a date on a tombstone.