Sylvia Plath

The only good man is a dead man.

Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the face.

I think I may well be a Jew.

Blackness is spreading over me like a cancer.

I wish I could kill myself.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

I want to kill myself to punish everyone.

The woman is perfected. Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment.

[Ted] told me openly he wished me dead.

Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage.

I underwent a rather brief and traumatic experience of badly-given shock treatments on an outpatient basis. Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide.

I long for someone 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…'

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb.

If I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotions and tears all the time.

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.

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.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

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've a call.

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.