I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. Sylvia Plath More Quotes by Sylvia Plath More Quotes From Sylvia Plath The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain. Sylvia Plath pain heart blood The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Sylvia Plath moon dark doors I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one. Sylvia Plath baths pain thinking I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Sylvia Plath college mother jobs Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Sylvia Plath oracles thirty years If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Sylvia Plath impression moon beautiful Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. Sylvia Plath wall stars baby Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning. Sylvia Plath dream writing running You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn. Sylvia Plath barns space baby She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. Sylvia Plath moments reflection window The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind. Sylvia Plath suicidal sacrifice mind 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 witty food thinking Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen. Sylvia Plath please good-things want I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. Sylvia Plath perfectly-good gold numbers I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I'm very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn't at all in my early twenties. Sylvia Plath reading war thinking Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me. Sylvia Plath melting-away melting feels What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "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. Sylvia Plath writing book school I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. Sylvia Plath wall tombstone college If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred. Sylvia Plath soldier would-be war It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles. Sylvia Plath unique wind believe