My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
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...
I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am alr...
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.
That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.Save them for my funeral, I'd said.
Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
What do you have in mind after you graduate?What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a pro...
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 t...
I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.
She looked terrible, but very wise.
It wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, 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...
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, ‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’‘No, what?’ I would say.‘A piece of dust.’Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would sa...
Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known th...
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.
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...
But when it came right down to it, the skin 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...