Top 100 Sylvia Plath Quotes
#1. He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death,
Her wormy couriers are at his bones.
Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
Sylvia Plath
#2. I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
Sylvia Plath
#5. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
#6. One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.
Sylvia Plath
#7. Curled in the cavernous leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of highly polished desk. Doctor
Sylvia Plath
#8. Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.
Sylvia Plath
#9. I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
Sylvia Plath
#10. I needed experience. How Could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?
Sylvia Plath
#11. The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.
Sylvia Plath
#13. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.
Sylvia Plath
#14. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.
Sylvia Plath
#16. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
Sylvia Plath
#17. Is that life after death - mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring?
Sylvia Plath
#18. Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.
Sylvia Plath
#19. My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.
Sylvia Plath
#20. conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna
Sylvia Plath
#22. Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.
Sylvia Plath
#23. I looked up from that churning amphitheater to the view beyond it.
The great, gray eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist-shrouded sun focusing
all the white and silent distances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to stall at my feet.
Sylvia Plath
#24. We shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia Plath
#25. I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
Sylvia Plath
#26. I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing ...
Sylvia Plath
#27. But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)
Sylvia Plath
#28. Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action
Sylvia Plath
#29. It was a face that needed soap and water and Christian tolerance.
Sylvia Plath
#30. I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.
Sylvia Plath
#31. There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace?
Sylvia Plath
#34. I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
Sylvia Plath
#35. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. ( ... )and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more ...
Sylvia Plath
#36. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
Sylvia Plath
#37. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
Sylvia Plath
#38. Of course, I didn't know he was a hypocrite at first. I thought
Sylvia Plath
#39. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.
Sylvia Plath
#40. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#41. A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds ...
Sylvia Plath
#42. My heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.
Sylvia Plath
#43. I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath
#44. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#46. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.
Sylvia Plath
#47. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
Sylvia Plath
#48. I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists
Sylvia Plath
#49. Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.
Sylvia Plath
#50. The silence surged back, smoothing itself as black water smooths to its old surface calm over a dropped stone.
Sylvia Plath
#51. The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.
Sylvia Plath
#52. The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
Sylvia Plath
#53. All I'd heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for. So I didn't really see the harm in anything Buddy would think up to do.
Sylvia Plath
#54. Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
Sylvia Plath
#55. It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt)
Sylvia Plath
#56. 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. It's like quicksand ... hopeless from the start.
Sylvia Plath
#57. I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart.
Sylvia Plath
#58. It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one.
Sylvia Plath
#59. Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.
Sylvia Plath
#60. Water will run by rule; the actual sun / Will scrupulously rise and set; / No little man lives in the exacting moon / And that is that, is that, is that.
Sylvia Plath
#62. Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.
Sylvia Plath
#63. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair, and I will begin to think again.
Sylvia Plath
#65. I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.
Sylvia Plath
#66. The voice came from a cool, rational region far above my head.
Sylvia Plath
#67. They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962
Sylvia Plath
#69. If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.
Sylvia Plath
#70. I don't know how long I kept at it ...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more
Sylvia Plath
#71. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#72. In the heart of the forest your image follows me
Sylvia Plath
#73. I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
Sylvia Plath
#74. I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.
Sylvia Plath
#75. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
Sylvia Plath
#76. I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost ... but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me.
Sylvia Plath
#77. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#78. I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
Sylvia Plath
#79. I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life ... I dream too much, work too little.
Sylvia Plath
#80. Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.
That would fix a lot of people.
Sylvia Plath
#82. I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything.
Sylvia Plath
#83. Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.
Sylvia Plath
#84. And when the balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump -
Sylvia Plath
#85. The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
Sylvia Plath
#86. God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.
Sylvia Plath
#87. They would grow old. They would forget me.
Sylvia Plath
#88. Joy:show joy & enjoy: then others will be joyful.
Sylvia Plath
#89. That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.
Sylvia Plath
#90. I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.
Sylvia Plath
#91. But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many ... ?
Sylvia Plath
#92. Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.
Sylvia Plath
#93. I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.
Sylvia Plath
#95. You are still on your own; be stoic; don't panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing GIVING love of spring ... dawn came, black and white gray into a frozen hell.
I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.
Sylvia Plath
#96. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#97. Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.
Sylvia Plath
#99. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#100. I SHALL BE USEFUL WHEN I LIE DOWN FINALLY: THEN THE TREES MAY TOUCH ME FOR ONCE, AND THE FLOWERS HAVE TIME FOR ME.
Sylvia Plath
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