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.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

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.

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

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.

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

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.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

I am not cruel —only truthful.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

God, who am I?

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

Is anyone anywhere happy?

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.

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?

Dying is an art.Like everything else,I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I have a call.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

LADY LAZARUSI have done it again.One year in every tenI manage it--A sort of walking miracle, my skinBright as a Nazi lampshade,My right footA paperweight,My face a featureless, fineJew linen.Peel off the napkinO my enemy.Do I terrify?--The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?The sour breathWill vanish in a day.Soon, soon the fleshThe grave cave ate will beAt home on meAnd I a smiling woman.I am only thirty.And like the cat I have nine times to die.This is Number Three.What a trashTo annihilate each decade.What a million filaments.The peanut-crunching crowdShoves in to seeThem unwrap me hand and foot--The big strip tease.Gentlemen, ladiesThese are my handsMy knees.I may be skin and bone,Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.The first time it happened I was ten.It was an accident.The second time I meantTo last it out and not come back at all.I rocked shutAs a seashell.They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.DyingIs an art, like everything else.I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I've a call.It's easy enough to do it in a cell.It's easy enough to do it and stay put.It's the theatricalComeback in broad dayTo the same place, the same face, the same bruteAmused shout:'A miracle!'That knocks me out.There is a chargeFor the eyeing of my scars, there is a chargeFor the hearing of my heart--It really goes.And there is a charge, a very large chargeFor a word or a touchOr a bit of bloodOr a piece of my hair or my clothes.So, so, Herr Doktor.So, Herr Enemy.I am your opus,I am your valuable,The pure gold babyThat melts to a shriek.I turn and burn.Do not think I underestimate your great concern.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 LuciferBewareBeware.Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.

I’ll never speak to God again.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

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.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon's celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look's leashDangles the puppet-peopleWho, unaware how they dwindle,Laugh, kiss, get drunk,Nor guess that if I choose to blinkThey die.IWhen in good humour,Give grass its greenBlazon sky blue, and endow the sunWith gold;Yet, in my wintriest moods, I holdAbsolute powerTo boycott color and forbid any flowerTo be.IKnow you appearVivid at my side,Denying you sprang out of my head,Claiming you feelLove fiery enough to prove flesh real,Though it's quite clearAll your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,From me."Soliloquy of the Solipsist", 1956

I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty of a garden bedAttracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,Unknowing I must soon unpetal.Compared with me, a tree is immortalAnd a flower-head not tall, but more startling,And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.Sometimes I think that when I am sleepingI must most perfectly resemble them--Thoughts gone dim.It is more natural to me, lying down.Then the sky and I are in open conversation,And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961

I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Is it the sea you hear in me,Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)

O love, how did you get here?--Nick and the Candlestick

Stars open among the lilies.Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?This is the silence of astounded souls.

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue

brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.

Although, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burning tookPossession of the most obtuse objects now and then --

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

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.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

There was a beautiful time...

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

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.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.

Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars ...

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?"Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.

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

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.

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after Ihad children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. 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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast andcoffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but assoon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up by making her lifemiserable.

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.

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.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat

The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions are different from a women's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly.

My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse

This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

Nick and the CandlestickI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tearsThe earthen wombExudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airsWrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides.They weld to me like plums.Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer.Even the newts are white,Those holy Joes.And the fish, the fish ----Christ! they are panes of ice,A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinkingIts first communion out of my live toes. The candleGulps and recovers its small altitude,Its yellows hearten.O love, how did you get here? O embryoRemembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms cleanIn you, ruby. The painYou wake to is not yours.Love, love,I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs ----The last of Victoriana. Let the starsPlummet to their dark address,Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well,You are the oneSolid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

Between Sylvia and me there existed as between my own mother and me - a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy (words from Aurelia Plath from the Introduction)

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

Neurotic, ha!" I let out a scornful laugh. "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt

I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

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

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.A bad dream. I remembered everything.

Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?If I could bleed, or sleep!If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling.But colorless. Colorless.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

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.

The reason why I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...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?

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned upand be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)

Unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long.

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming "Traitor, sinner, imposter.

Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?

What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

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

How we need another soul to cling to.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

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 tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy of poppies.But when it came right down to it, the sink of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face.But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots.The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

Fixed stars govern a life

If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

The tongues of hell are dull.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.

I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk

EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

LoreleiIt is no night to drown in:A full moon, river lapsingBlack beneath bland mirror-sheen,The blue water-mists droppingScrim after scrim like fishnetsThough fishermen are sleeping,The massive castle turretsDoubling themselves in a glassAll stillness. Yet these shapes floatUp toward me, troubling the faceOf quiet. From the nadirThey rise, their limbs ponderousWith richness, hair heavierThan sculptured marble. They singOf a world more full and clearThan can be. Sisters, your songBears a burden too weightyFor the whorled ear's listeningHere, in a well-steered country,Under a balanced ruler.Deranging by harmonyBeyond the mundane order,Your voices lay siege. You lodgeOn the pitched reefs of nightmare,Promising sure harborage;By day, descant from bordersOf hebetude, from the ledgeAlso of high windows. WorseEven than your maddeningSong, your silence. At the sourceOf your ice-hearted calling-Drunkenness of the great depths.O river, I see driftingDeep in your flux of silverThose great goddesses of peace.Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

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.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

This is a case without a body.The body does not come into it at all.

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

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.

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.

She looked terrible, but very wise.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

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.

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.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 onto 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.

I woke to the sound of rain.

I am your opus.

All the gods know is destinations.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?

Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

Wind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

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

DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died before I had time―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toeBig as a Frisco sealAnd a head in the freakish AtlanticWhen it pours bean green over blueIn the waters of beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du.In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars.But the name of the town is common.My Polack friendSays there are a dozen or two.So I never could tell where youPut your foot, your root,I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw.It stuck in a barb wire snare.Ich, ich, ich, ich,I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you.And the language obsceneAn engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.I began to talk like a Jew.I think I may well be a Jew.The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of ViennaAre not very pure or true.With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luckAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew.I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You―Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you.You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut no less a devil for that, no notAnd less the black man whoBit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I’m finally through.The black telephone’s off at the root,The voices just can’t worm through.If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two―The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year,Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now.There’s a stake in your fat black heartAnd the villagers never like you.They are dancing and stamping on you.They always knew it was you.Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.