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

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Life Plath

He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.

~ Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes Death Life Plath Sheep 1976 Suicide

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Experience Journals Plath Poems Poet Poetry Sylvia Plath Writer Writing

Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under.

~ Kelli Russell Agodon

Kelli Russell Agodon Plath Poetry

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Expression Plath Sylvia Writing

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Plath Sickness Writing

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.” I struggle to think of any line of thinking more linked to being a socialized female than to consider the declaration of simply existing to feel like a form of bragging. But that, of course, is the plight of the feeling girl: to be told again and again that her very existence is something not worth declaring.

~ Alana Massey

Alana Massey Feminism Gender Plath Women

Sylvia was an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly. She is at once her own documentarian and the reflexive voice that says she is unworthy of documentation. She sends her image into the world to be seen, discussed, and devoured, proclaiming that the ordinariness or ugliness of her existence does not remove her right to have it.

~ Alana Massey

Alana Massey Feminism Gender Plath Society Sylvia Plath Women

She looked terrible, but very wise.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Plath The Bell Jar Wise

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Fall Fallen Plath Sylvia The Bella Jar