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Sylvia Plath
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„It’s a tango.” Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. “I love tangos.” “I can’t dance.” “You don’t have to dance. I’ll do that dancing.” Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, “Pretend you are drowning.” I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco’s leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, “It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one,” and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. “What did I tell you?“
„Darling, all nightI have been flickering, off, on, off, on.The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.“
„I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.“
„Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Searching my reaches for what she really is.Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.I am important to her. She comes and goes.Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old womanRises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.“
„The abstract kills, the concrete saves.“
„A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.“
„I hated to serve men in any way.“
„Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.“
„For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.“
„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 as poppies. 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 under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.“
„p>You said you would kill it this morning.Do not kill it. It startles me still,The jut of that odd, dark head, pacingThrough the uncut grass on the elm’s hill.It is something to own a pheasant,Or just to be visited at all.I am not mystical: it isn’tAs if I thought it had a spirit.It is simply in its element.That gives it a kingliness, a right.
„These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.They grew their toes and fingers well enough,Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.If they missed out on walking about like peopleIt wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.“
„p>The woman is perfectedHer deadBody wears the smile of accomplishment,The illusion of a Greek necessityFlows in the scrolls of her toga,Her bareFeet seem to be saying:We have come so far, it is over.Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,One at each littlePitcher of milk, now empty.She has foldedThem back into her body as petalsOf a rose close when the gardenStiffens and odors bleedFrom the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.The moon has nothing to be sad about,Staring from her hood of bone.She is used to this sort of thing.Her blacks crackle and drag.
„Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.“
„”Does she know you love her?” “Of course.” I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. “If you love her,” I said, “you’ll love somebody else someday.”“
„Ironically, Henry James’ biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn’t read him.“
„p>I am incapable of more knowledge.What is this, this faceSo murderous in its strangle of branches? —Its snaky acids hiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults,That kill, that kill, that kill.
„AxesAfter whose stroke the wood rings,And the echoes!Echoes travellingOff from the centre like horses.“
„You 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.“
„p> So many of us!So many of us!We are shelves, we areTables, we are meek,We are edible,Nudgers and shoversIn spite of ourselves.Our kind multiplies:We shall by morningInherit the earth.Our foot’s in the door.
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