Top 100 Plath Sylvia Quotes
#1. If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.
Sylvia Plath
#2. 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' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.
Sylvia Plath
#3. This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.
Sylvia Plath
#4. Over your body the clouds go
High, high and icily
And a little flat, as if they
Floated on a glass that was invisible.
Unlike swans,
Having no reflections;
Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
All cool, all blue. Unlike you
You, there on your back,
Eyes to the sky.
Sylvia Plath
#5. This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
Sylvia Plath
#6. I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
Sylvia Plath
#7. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless 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.
Sylvia Plath
#8. I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.
Sylvia Plath
#9. I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.
Francesca Lia Block
#10. Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance.
Sylvia Plath
#11. Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color - it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown ... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.
Sylvia Plath
#12. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#13. Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.
Sylvia Plath
#14. We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
Sylvia Plath
#15. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#16. Curled in the cavernous leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of highly polished desk. Doctor
Sylvia Plath
#17. WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
Lauren Groff
#19. One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.
Sylvia Plath
#20. For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
#22. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
Sylvia Plath
#23. If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.
Sylvia Plath
#24. Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream
Sylvia Plath
#26. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.
Sylvia Plath
#27. 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
#29. The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon.
Al Alvarez
#30. I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.
Sylvia Plath
#31. One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
Sylvia Plath
#32. Five balls! Five bright brass balls!
To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.
Sylvia Plath
#34. The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.
Sylvia Plath
#35. His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.
Sylvia Plath
#36. But not so odd a name, after all, if you've ever read through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and Sasparilla Greenleafs. I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren't called Smith.
Sylvia Plath
#37. Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms
Sylvia Plath
#38. When am I going to see you?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"Very much."
"Never," I said, and hung up with a resolute click.
Sylvia Plath
#39. I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.
Sylvia Plath
#40. There is no life higher than the grasstops
Sylvia Plath
#41. As I paddled on, mt heartbeat boomed like a motor in my ears. I am I am I am.
Sylvia Plath
#42. At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there were no windows.
Sylvia Plath
#44. 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
#45. I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?
Sylvia Plath
#46. To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
Sylvia Plath
#47. The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.
Sylvia Plath
#48. We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
Sylvia Plath
#49. Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
Sylvia Plath
#51. I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
Sylvia Plath
#52. What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
Sylvia Plath
#53. Though it's quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.
Sylvia Plath
#54. Remember how you asked me where would I like to live best, the country or the city?"
"And you said ... "
"And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?
Sylvia Plath
#55. Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Sylvia Plath
#56. If I have a dry spell ... I wait and live harder, eyes, ears, and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer.
Sylvia Plath
#57. I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.
Sylvia Plath
#58. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.
Sylvia Plath
#59. O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
From the poem "Cut", 24 October 1962
Sylvia Plath
#60. And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments.
Sylvia Plath
#61. Talking about my fears to others feeds it.
Sylvia Plath
#63. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#64. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.
Sylvia Plath
#65. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
Sylvia Plath
#66. I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
Sylvia Plath
#68. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
Sylvia Plath
#69. It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one-not at all.
Sylvia Plath
#70. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#71. The consequences of love affairs would stop me from my independent freedom of creative activity, and I don't intend to be stopped.
Sylvia Plath
#72. Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
Sylvia Plath
#74. Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.
Sylvia Plath
#75. Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
Sylvia Plath
#76. On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.
Sylvia Plath
#77. It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.
Sylvia Plath
#78. I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.
Sylvia Plath
#79. I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead
after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.
Sylvia Plath
#80. There I went again, building p a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few posy nothings.
Sylvia Plath
#82. There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Ted Hughes
#83. If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.
Sylvia Plath
#84. The frost makes a flower,
the dew makes a star.
Sylvia Plath
#85. There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
Sylvia Plath
#86. My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.
Sylvia Plath
#87. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception.
Sylvia Plath
#88. Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair
Tangling in the tide's green fall
Now fold their wings like bats and disappear
Into the attic of the skull.
Sylvia Plath
#89. 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
#90. In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.
Sylvia Plath
#91. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
#92. The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird.
Sylvia Plath
#94. Shut up in public those bloody private wounds.
Sylvia Plath
#95. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.
Sylvia Plath
#96. When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
Sylvia Plath
#97. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#98. Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962
Sylvia Plath
#99. If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.
Sylvia Plath
#100. 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 at peace.
Sylvia Plath
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