Sylvia Plath

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

And I, love, am a pathological liar.

I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

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.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

I think I made you up inside my head.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry.

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.