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  • #1
    Sylvia Plath
    “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #2
    Sylvia Plath
    “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #3
    Sylvia Plath
    “Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #4
    Sylvia Plath
    “I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #5
    Sylvia Plath
    “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?”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #6
    Sylvia Plath
    “I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #7
    Sylvia Plath
    “I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #8
    Sylvia Plath
    “I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #9
    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 Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #10
    Sylvia Plath
    “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

  • #11
    Sylvia Plath
    “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

  • #12
    Sylvia Plath
    “I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #13
    Sylvia Plath
    “So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #14
    Sylvia Plath
    “Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #15
    Sylvia Plath
    “August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
    Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  • #16
    Louise Glück
    “Living things don't all require
    light in the same degree. Some of us
    make our own light: a silver leaf
    like a path no one can use, a shallow
    lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

    But you know this already.
    You and the others who think
    you live for truth and, by extension, love
    all that is cold.”
    Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012

  • #17
    Louise Glück
    “Aubade "

    There was one summer
    that returned many times over
    there was one flower unfurling
    taking many forms

    Crimson of the monarda, pale gold of the late roses

    There was one love
    There was one love, there were many nights

    Smell of the mock orange tree
    Corridors of jasmine and lilies
    Still the wind blew

    There were many winters but I closed my eyes
    The cold air white with dissolved wings

    There was one garden when the snow melted
    Azure and white; I couldn’t tell
    my solitude from love—

    There was one love; he had many voices
    There was one dawn; sometimes
    we watched it together

    I was here
    I was here

    There was one summer returning over and over
    there was one dawn
    I grew old watching”
    Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012

  • #18
    Louise Glück
    “Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
    now you are homeless, an orphan
    in succession of shelters.”
    Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012

  • #19
    Louise Glück
    “whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice…"
    -”
    Louise Glück, Poems, 1962-2012
    tags: poem

  • #20
    Louise Glück
    “Remember that time you made the wish?

    I make a lot of wishes.

    The time I lied to you
    about the butterfly. I always wondered
    what you wished for.

    What do you think I wished for?

    I don't know. That I'd come back,
    that we'd somehow be together in the end.

    I wished for what I always wish for.
    I wished for another poem.”
    Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

  • #21
    Louise Glück
    “Matins

    You want to know how I spend my time?
    I walk the front lawn, pretending
    to be weeding. You ought to know
    I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling
    clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
    I'm looking for courage, for some evidence
    my life will change, though
    it takes forever, checking
    each clump for the symbolic
    leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
    the leaves turning, always the sick trees
    going first, the dying turning
    brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
    their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
    As empty now as at the first note.
    Or was the point always
    to continue without a sign?”
    Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

  • #22
    Louise Glück
    “Field Flowers

    What are you saying? That you want
    eternal life? Are your thoughts really
    as compelling as all that? Certainly
    you don’t look at us, don’t listen to us,
    on your skin
    stain of sun, dust
    of yellow buttercups: I’m talking
    to you, you staring through
    bars of high grass shaking
    your little rattle – O
    the soul! The soul! Is it enough
    only to look inward? Contempt
    for humanity is one thing, but why
    disdain the expansive
    field, your gaze rising over the clear heads
    of the wild buttercups into what? Your poor
    idea of heaven: absence
    of change. Better than earth? How
    would you know, who are neither
    here nor there, standing in our midst?

    Louise Glück”
    Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

  • #23
    Louise Glück
    “You get on a train, you disappear.

    You write your name on the window, you disappear.

    There are places like this everywhere,
    places you enter as a young girl
    from which you never return.”
    Louise Glück, Averno

  • #24
    Louise Glück
    “The sound of the sea— just memory now.”
    Louise Glück, Averno

  • #25
    Louise Glück
    “In the silence of consciousness I asked myself:
    why did I reject my life? And I answer
    Die Erde überwältigt mich:
    the earth defeats me.”
    Louise Glück, Averno

  • #26
    Louise Glück
    “What others found in art,
    I found in nature. What others found
    in human love, I found in nature.”
    Louise Glück, Averno

  • #27
    Louise Glück
    “Time passed, turning everything to ice.
    Under the ice, the future stirred.
    If you fell into it, you died.

    It was a time
    of waiting, of suspended action.

    I lived in the present, which was
    that part of the future you could see.
    The past floated above my head,
    like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

    It was a time
    governed by contradictions, as in
    I felt nothing and
    I was afraid.
    Louise Glück, Averno

  • #28
    Sylvia Plath
    “Let me sit in a flowerpot,
    The spiders won't notice.
    My heart is a stopped geranium.”
    Sylvia Plath, Plath: Poems

  • #29
    Sylvia Plath
    “The storerooms are full of hearts.
    This is the city of spare parts.”
    Sylvia Plath, Plath: Poems

  • #30
    Sylvia Plath
    “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, Plath: Poems



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