Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954


Sylvia Plath

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I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows fr...
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What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
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I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies,...
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We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
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I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
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When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
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How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To re...
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So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding qui...
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I am terrified by this dark thing
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A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, fe...
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One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
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Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become a...
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That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
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After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.
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I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962
SYLVIA PLATH
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something be...
SYLVIA PLATH
I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
SYLVIA PLATH
I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut...
SYLVIA PLATH
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
SYLVIA PLATH
How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
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I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy wear...
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Ennui

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing...
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I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
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Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
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If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.
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I don't know how long I kept at it...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and la...
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The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark...
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Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
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There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
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What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
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Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling...
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I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will
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My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing ...
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...I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete tes...
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I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly con...
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Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
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Tree and Stone glittered, without shadows.My finger-length grew lucent as glass.I started to bud lik...
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If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the bri...
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The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comf...
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I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into ...
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So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.
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I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life...
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How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?
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There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make...
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I think I may well be a Jew.
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With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is li...
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Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s he...
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There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minu...
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I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de...
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The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther...
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I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too clo...
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I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
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But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn...
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I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
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I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
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That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite secu...
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To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
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When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photogr...
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The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
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The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
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What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is ...
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So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being ...
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My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off ...
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I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the ...
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The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.
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What did my arms do before they held you?
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I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
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Is anyone anywhere happy?
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I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to rea...
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I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but...
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What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
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You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult ki...
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It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...
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Hastanenin arazisi yeni yağmış karla örtülüydü -bu bir Noel serpintisi değil, ocak ayının ...
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