Sylvia Plath

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

I'm never going to get married." "You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind." "No. My mind's made up.

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

I am not cruel, only truthful.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.