Top 100 Plath's Quotes
#1. If too much has been made of the symptoms of Plath's mental illness, so too little attention has been paid to its possible causes. Sylvia Plath was an angry young woman born in a country and at a time that only exacerbated and intensified her fury.
Andrew Wilson
#2. 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
#3. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#4. I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
From the poem Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath
#5. What's in the bag?" Plath asked.
"Laptops and phones. And guns."
"Laptops and phones and guns, oh my!" Burnofsky parodied.
Michael Grant
#6. Look, if you ask a child, 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath,' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.
Ayelet Waldman
#7. You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness.
Sylvia Plath
#8. Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen.' [ ... ] I sat like that for about an hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot doll in her mother's old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well.
Sylvia Plath
#9. Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!
Sylvia Plath
#10. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed and sung me moonstruck, kissed me quite insane. And before you think that's cheesy,that's Sylvia Plath. Google her, young Padawan.
Leah Raeder
#11. 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
Sylvia Plath
#12. Wind warns November's done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.
Sylvia Plath
#13. Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
Sylvia Plath
#14. I have never read Sylvia Plath. My mother has never read Virginia Woolf. In general, we have stayed out of one another's way like this.
Alison Bechdel
#15. I'm never going to get married."
"You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind."
"No. My mind's made up.
Sylvia Plath
#16. I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
Sylvia Plath
#17. It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual ...
Sylvia Plath
#18. It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell- tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.
Sylvia Plath
#19. Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under.
Kelli Russell Agodon
#20. What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.
Sylvia Plath
#21. I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.
Sylvia Plath
#22. That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself...
Sylvia Plath
#24. Every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles and hour.
Sylvia Plath
#25. I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls.
Sylvia Plath
#26. It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends.
Stephen Fry
#27. Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.
Mary Lambert
#28. I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.
Sylvia Plath
#29. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#30. He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn't. He had what no American man I've ever met has had, and that's intuition.
Sylvia Plath
#31. All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
Sylvia Plath
#33. 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
#34. People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly.
Sylvia Plath
#35. A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk ...
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
Sylvia Plath
#36. As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one's individuality it seems more and more a product of fate - - inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.
Sylvia Plath
#37. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#38. That's tough, Joan," I said, picking up my book. "Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.
Sylvia Plath
#39. I like you."
"That's tough, Joan," I said, picking up my book. "Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know."
And I walked out of the room, leaving Joan lying, lumpy as an old horse, across my bed.
Sylvia Plath
#40. Maybe it's my ego. Maybe I crave someone who will never be my rival.
Sylvia Plath
#41. When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.
Sylvia Plath
#42. I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.
Kola Boof
#43. Being mythological does wonders for one's ego.
Sylvia Plath
#44. To learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there's butter on it
Sylvia Plath
#45. choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. Constantin's
Sylvia Plath
#46. 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.
Sylvia Plath
#47. What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
Sylvia Plath
#48. Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
Sylvia Plath
#49. I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the proper sort of man.
Sylvia Plath
#50. I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.
Stephen King
#51. I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study.
Sylvia Plath
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Sylvia Plath
#55. 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
#56. I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.
Sylvia Plath
#57. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.
Sylvia Plath
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Talking about my fears to others feeds it.
Sylvia Plath
#62. 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
#63. I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
Sylvia Plath
#64. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
Sylvia Plath
#65. Though it's quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.
Sylvia Plath
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.
Ted Hughes
#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. 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
#77. 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
#78. The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.
Sylvia Plath
#79. Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?
Sylvia Plath
#80. I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee's love-seat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.
Sylvia Plath
#81. I couldn't stand was Buddy's pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure, when all the time he'd been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing in my face.
Sylvia Plath
#82. You defy questions;
You defy other godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border,
Exiled to no good.
Sylvia Plath
#83. Go out and do something. It isn't your room that's a prison, it's yourself.
Sylvia Plath
#84. 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
#85. It was only after seeing Irwin's study that I decided to seduce him.
Sylvia Plath
#86. I'm very interested in everything. The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee's desk, like so many wooden nickels.
Sylvia Plath
#87. I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.
Sylvia Plath
#88. We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
Sylvia Plath
#89. The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Sylvia Plath
#90. If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.
Sylvia Plath
#91. 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
#92. Shut up in public those bloody private wounds.
Sylvia Plath
#93. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.
Sylvia Plath
#94. When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
Sylvia Plath
#95. 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
#96. Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962
Sylvia Plath
#97. If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.
Sylvia Plath
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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