December 24, 2011

1:30pm
December 22, 2011
"‘I don’t really know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.
It sounded true, and I recognised it, the way you recognise some nondescript person that’s been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham."

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

7:31pm
December 22, 2011
"There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll take a hot bath’.
I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck.
I remember the ceilings over every bathtub I’ve stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colours and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs, too: the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I remember the shapes and sizes of the water taps and the different sorts of soap-holders.
I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath."

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

7:13pm
December 10, 2011
A young Sylvia Plath

A young Sylvia Plath

5:51am
December 1, 2011
"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

3:40pm
November 18, 2011
"I have stitched life into me like a rare organ."

— Sylvia Plath

7:31pm
November 17, 2011
"Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

8:11pm
November 10, 2011
"With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand… hopeless from the start."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

3:19pm
October 31, 2011
Annie Hall, 1977

Annie Hall, 1977

9:10pm
October 19, 2011
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes with his parents, William and Edith, 1956

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes with his parents, William and Edith, 1956

2:20pm
October 18, 2011
"I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

12:27pm
October 17, 2011
"If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if I didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

1:03am
October 11, 2011
"I talk to God but the sky is empty."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

5:01pm
October 7, 2011
"

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

"

— Sylvia Plath, Elm

10:28pm
October 5, 2011
"I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old."

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

9:21pm