#plath

My world falls apart, crumbles, “The centre cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#faith

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. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#dreams

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#sylvia-plath #beauty

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

— Sylvia Plath

#married #sylvia-plath #the-bella-jar #change

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#life #sylvia-plath #death

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

— Sylvia Plath

#depression #sadness #sylvia-plath #the-bell-jar #change

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’ ‘No, what?’ I would say. ‘A piece of dust.’ Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’ And of course Buddy wouldn’t have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#the-bell-jar #imagination

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#plath #life

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#desire #love #need #security #sylvia-plath

I think I am mad sometimes. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#journalism