"Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?"
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Sylvia Plath quotes (page 8 of 31)
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"I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists"
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"Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through."
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"The abstract kills, the concrete saves."
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"My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart."
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"I am dead to them, even though I once flowered."
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"I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out."
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"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."
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"I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters."
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"I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak."
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"If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth."
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"I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me."
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"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
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"Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul."
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"Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams."
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"So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever."
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"Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending."
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"I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable."
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"... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it."
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"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."
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