Quote

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

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Sylvia Plath
Age: 30 †
Born: 1932
Born: October 27
Died: 1963
Died: February 11
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Victoria Lucas
Sylvia Plath Hughes
Somebody
Rivals
Starfish
Grows
Watched
Nursed
Alive
Birthday
Otherness
Lost
Stone
Flung
Else
Awful
Rival
Back
Stones
Jars
Sometimes
Arms
Jam
Grow
Perish

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There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
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A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.
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I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.
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Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?
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I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.
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And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.
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I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
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I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini.
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Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.
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I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.
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I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
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