Sylvia Plath

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

My mother smiled. 'I knew my baby wasn't like that.'I looked at her. 'Like what?'Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.' She paused. 'I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free——The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

I woke to the sound of rain.

Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.

They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem 'Lady Lazarus', written 23-29 October 1962.