Sylvia Plath quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

  • If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

  • There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

  • But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

  • I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

  • Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

  • In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars

  • Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

  • I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

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

  • Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

  • Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

  • I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

  • Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

  • Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.

  • When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

  • Is there no way out of the mind?

  • I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

  • I have a visual imagination.

  • When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

  • What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

  • One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

  • Empty, I echo to the least footfall

  • Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart?

  • So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

  • I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

  • I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

  • I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

  • I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after Ihad children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

  • 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?

  • And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

  • A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

  • And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.

  • Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

  • I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

  • I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

  • Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

  • 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 them and I am very pure.

  • In this particular tub, two knees jut uplike icebergs, while minute brown hairs riseon arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soapnavigates the tidal slosh of seasbreaking on legendary beaches; in faithwe shall board our imagined ship and wildly sailamong sacred islands of the mad till deathshatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

  • Sunday - the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.

  • Can nothingness be so prodigal?

  • Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying."

  • It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it."

  • We are not what we might be; what we are / Outlaws all extrapolation / Beyond the interval of now and here: / White whales are gone with the white ocean."

  • Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves.All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting."

  • The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things."

  • I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

  • Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

  • We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

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

  • We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

  • What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

  • I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

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

  • Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

  • 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 life. And I am horribly limited.

  • I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

  • I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

  • Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

  • There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

  • The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

  • I am too pure for you or anyone.

  • Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

  • Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

  • My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

  • There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

  • All the heat and fear had 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 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.

  • I am made, crudely, for success.

  • I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.

  • I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

  • Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

  • That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

  • There was a beautiful time...

  • 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 the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

  • All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

  • Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance.

  • What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.

  • Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

  • I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

  • I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

  • I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

  • The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.

  • With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be.

  • Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.

  • The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

  • I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

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

  • When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

  • As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

  • I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

  • O heart, such disorganization!

  • A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

  • I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

  • Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen physical or psychological wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.

  • I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

  • There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.

  • There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.

  • Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."

  • And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

  • 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.

  • I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

  • How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

  • But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

  • My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart.

  • Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

  • 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.

  • Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady . . . I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?

  • I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

  • Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

  • Happy! That is indefinable as far as states of being go.

  • Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

  • The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

  • I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.

  • And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

  • To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

  • 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.

  • Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

  • If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

  • The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share