Zitat des Tages von Sylvia Plath:
When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.
It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.
I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.
Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.
How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.
What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
How we need another soul to cling to.
A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
Is there no way out of the mind?
But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.
There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job.
The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water - blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be - were enough to watch.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.
I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.
I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'
Every woman adores a Fascist.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.
We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.
If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.
I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.
Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.