Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

-Sylvia Plath

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

-Sylvia Plath

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...

-Sylvia Plath

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

-Sylvia Plath

The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

-Sylvia Plath

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?

-Sylvia Plath

jealous

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

-Sylvia Plath

My world falls apart, crumbles, “The centre cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go.

-Sylvia Plath

i want to write

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.

I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.

-Sylvia Plath

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. 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.

-Sylvia Plath

a bundle

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 

I'm scared

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... 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. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

-Sylvia Plath

my husband

 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.

-Sylvia Plath

another soul

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.

-Sylvia Plath

combination of fairy-tale

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

i must get my soul back

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

-Sylvia Plath

god, but life is loneliness

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 am still so naïve

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

i can never read all the books i want

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

Der alle stier taper seg

Den mann som drepte tirsdag

var han en morder mandag?

Og våkner onsdag mot et grått vindu

med skodden østlig drivende igjennom ham

hvem er han nå

den mann igår?

da steinen løftet hånden hans til slag

eller den han var i forgårs

hvem

når var i forgårs

Lyset fra pianolampen husker han

og hender mot tangentene

ja Händel

Og en tung grå stein, knasende

Han stirrer innover

der gamle øyemerker løses opp i skodden

endrer form og skifter plass

Og ser på disse hendene

hvem eier dem!

en stein de kastet fra seg i et dike

eller Händel, Händel

som har reist seg fra klaveret

uten å se på ham

lar døren gli igjen

Og bare hendene tilbake

lånt brukt

Liksom herreløse hunder er de

står og uler på en øde mo

mot torsdag fredag

-Paal Brekke (1960)