"Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
— Sylvia Plath

"When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
"
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"“ I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.""
— Sylvia Plath

""The box is only temporary.""
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel)

""Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?"

My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.

"It's almost three in the afternoon."

"I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.""
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again."
— Sylvia Plath

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."
— Sylvia Plath

"Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"What did my arms do before they held you?"
— Sylvia Plath

"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
"
— Sylvia Plath, Tulips

"How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?"
— Sylvia Plath

"We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"You smile.
No, it is not fatal."
— Sylvia Plath

"I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give."
— Sylvia Plath (Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?"
— Sylvia Plath

"I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets."
— Sylvia Plath

"I have stitched life into me like a rare organ"
— Sylvia Plath

"I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I am I am I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"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)

"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
— Sylvia Plath

"I love my rejection slips. They show me I try."
— Sylvia Plath

"His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn't want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.
The Tide ebbed, sucked back into itself. There I was, a reject, with the dried black seaweed whose hard beads I liked to pop, hollowed orange and grapefruit halves and a garbage of shells. All at once, old and lonely, I eyed these-- razor clams, fairy boats, weedy mussels, the oyster's pocked gray lace (there was never a pearl) and tiny white "ice cream cones." You could always tell where the best shells were-- at the rim of the last wave, marked by a mascara of tar. I picked up, frigidly, a stiff pink starfish. It lay at the heart of my palm, a joke dummy of my own hand. Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish."
— Sylvia Plath (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts)

"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 (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath

"God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering."
— Sylvia Plath

"Oh what a poet I will flay myself into."
— Sylvia Plath

"I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of themm, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream"
— Sylvia Plath (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts)

"I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye's darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard s study."
— Sylvia Plath

"I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me."
— Sylvia Plath

"The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Compared with me, a tree is immortal."
— Sylvia Plath

"Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy & peaceful."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up, They will think you are original and very witty."
— Sylvia Plath

"“ Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted. ” "
— Sylvia Plath

"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. "
— Charles Bukowski

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
— Charles Bukowski

"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
— Charles Bukowski (Women: A Novel)

"There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you."
— Charles Bukowski

"there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late"
— Charles Bukowski

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)