Sylvia Plath Quotes

I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

I felt it was very important not to be recognized.

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.

I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.

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

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

You smile.
No, it is not fatal.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen.
A far sea moves in my ear.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

I like people, but to learn about one individual always appeals to me more than anything.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.

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

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.

I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.

Write about the cow, Mrs. Spaulding's heavy eyelids, the smell of vanilla flavoring in a brown bottle. That's where the magic mountains begin.

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

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.

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.

There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

Why do my beheld beauties vanish and deform themselves as soon as I look twice.

Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow
and torment me.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

Curled in the cavernous leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of highly polished desk. Doctor

In spite of everything, I still have my good old sense of humor.

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

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. It

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Let me fly with you.

The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment.

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

Not being perfect hurts.

This is my first snow at Smith. It is like any other snow, but from a different window, and there lies the singular charm of it.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

Please, I want so badly for good things to happen.

(3 months before her suicide)

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

your fate involves a dark assailant

After that, I felt safer. I didn't want anything I said or did that night to be associated with me and my real name and coming from Boston.

I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

to be aware that you must compete somehow, and yet that wealth and beauty are not in your realm.

The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird.

Love is an illusion, but I would willingly fall for it if I could believe in it.

Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.

Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962

Fixed stars govern a life

I hurl my heart to halt his pace.

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.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

Is that life after death - mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring?

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

Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.
That would fix a lot of people.

Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea Moves

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

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

The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it.

I am silver and exact.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

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

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

The big men are all deaf; they don't want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street on cleated boots.

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.

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

I used to pray to recover you.

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

Anonymous young men with all-American bone structures.

You've only got so long to live.

conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.

The faces were empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.

So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life.

No day is safe from news of you.

I do not know who I am tonight.

The claw / Of the magnolia, / Drunk on its own secrets, / Asks nothing of life.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full. This

England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.

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

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

This is a case without a body.
The body does not come into it at all.