Sylvia Plath
“All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”
“I have always been extremely fond of the definition of Death, which says it is. Inaccessibility to Experience.”
“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.”
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery–air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.”
“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.”
“I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged–transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.”
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricochetting in between.”
“It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore. And yet, I cannot let it go. I cannot let it go.”
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
“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 a peace.”
“I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ bed, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.”
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
“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.”
“I luxuriate in suddenly letting go and crying my insides out.”
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
“Not easy to state the change you made. If I’m alive now, I was dead. Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
“See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.”
“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.”
“The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”
Anne Sexton
“I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.”
“Our hands are light blue and gentle, our eyes are full of terrible confessions.”
“One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.”
“I’m lost. And it’s my own fault. It’s about time I figured out that I can’t ask people to keep me found.”
“As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love.”
“Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.”
“One of my secret instructions to myself as a poet is, ‘Whatever you do, don’t be boring.’”
“I am so tired of waiting, aren’t you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife and cut the world in two–and see what worms are eating at the rind.”
“When I’m writing I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.”
“I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”
“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
“And we are magic talking to itself, noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins forgotten. Am I still lost? Once I was beautiful. Now, I am myself.”
“My mouth blooms like a cut.”
“Death’s in the goodbye.”
“You said the anger would come back just as the love did.”
“Suddenly I’m not half the girl I used to be. There’s a shadow hanging over me… from me to you out of my electric devil.”
“Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.”
“Give me your skin as sheer as a cobweb, let me open it up and listen in and scoop out the dark.”
“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.”
“And that is the way this thing goes. Layers. There are many. Be willing to see them. Intelligence is deeper in those who push past what they believe they already know.”
“Death sits with his key in my lock. Not one day is taken for granted.”
“Death. I need my little addiction to you. Need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.”
“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”
“And I don’t know, don’t know, if we belong together or apart, except that my soul lingers over the skin of you and I wonder if I’m ruining all we had, and had not.”
“The silence is death. It comes each day with its shock on my shoulder, a white bird, and peck at the black eyes and the vibrating red muscle of my mouth.”
Emily Dickinson
“We never know how high we are till we are called to rise. Then, if we are true to form our statures touch the skies.”
“I dwell in possibility.”
“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
“Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of death.”
“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”
“The brain is wider than the sky.”
“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul–and sings the tunes without the words–and never stops at all.”
“Forever is composed of nows.”
“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. Nor any course like a page of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take without oppress of toll. How frugal is the chariot that bears a human soul.”
“Pardon my sanity in a world insane.”
“Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.”
“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.”
“That love is all there is, is all we know of love.”
“Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed. To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need.”
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one and I look at it until it begins to shine.”
“In a serener bright, in a more golden light, I see each little doubt and fear, each little discord here removed.”
“Beauty is not caused. It is.”
“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better. Nature does not hurry. Yet everything is accomplished.”
“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”
“In this short life that only lasts an hour, how much–how little–is within our power.”
“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, or help one lonely person into happiness again, I shall not live in vain.”
“She dealt her pretty words like blades.”
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me. I know that is poetry, if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it is there any other way?”
“Write me of hope and love, and hearts that endured.”
“Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.”
“How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude.”
“You left me boundaries of pain capacious as the sea between eternity and time. Your consciousness and me.”
“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”
~~X~~
I feel very sentimental after writing down all my favorite quotes by my top three favorite poets. The quotes I incorporated by each poet are very meaningful to me; the depths within these quotes truly inspire me heavily. Now, I can see how most of my own poetry are heavily inspired and influenced by Plath, Sexton, and Dickinson.
If any of these three of my favorite poets were alive today, I’d have coffee with them and share each other’s poetry at either a coffeeshop or even better a bookshop. It would mean a lot to me if I ever go back in time to the past and speak with each and everyone one of them on how much I admire their poems and prevented them from dying young.
Obviously, I cannot do that since there’s no such thing as time traveling so the only alternative for me is to read their poems. I can never stop reading Plath, Sexton, and Dickinson; they’ll forever be a part of me and eternally my top three poetry influences.
Still, even in death, I would love to have coffee with them.