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The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

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
Thing
Hardest
Richly
Think
Regret
Tainted
Present
Spoiled
Future
Managed
Fear
Badly
Past
Feminism
Live
Letting
Without
Classic

More quotes by Sylvia Plath

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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.
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Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.
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I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.
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All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
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I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.
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I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.
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So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
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What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
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I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.
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I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted.
Sylvia Plath
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I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.
Sylvia Plath
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How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?
Sylvia Plath
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My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.
Sylvia Plath
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But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
Sylvia Plath
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I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.
Sylvia Plath
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I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.
Sylvia Plath
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One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.
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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.
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we walk the plank with strangers.
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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