Sylvia Plath

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.

This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don'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 new To want the world in a glass hat.

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

I’ll never speak to God again.

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

No day is safe from news of you.

I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.