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Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.

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
Make
Reader
Biographies
Think
Friends
James
Posthumous
Thinking
Known
Readers
Mocked
Life
Read
Reputation
Ironically
Pain
Critics
Comforts
Didn
Wrote
Insulted
Children
Gave
Biography
Long
Comfort
Henry

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Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.
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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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If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
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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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Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
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I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.
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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?
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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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But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
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To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
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After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.
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The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
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The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
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God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain ... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good.
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I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?
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Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
Sylvia Plath
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... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.
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When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.
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I am still so naïve I know pretty much what I like and dislike but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
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To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.
Sylvia Plath