Top 100 Quotes About Sylvia Plath
#1. WIDOW. The word consumes itself, said Sylvia Plath, who consumed herself.
Lauren Groff
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Sylvia Plath and I met a long time ago. A really long time ago. Was it a summer day? No! It was a wintry November morning!
Avijeet Das
#5. Beachy Head brims with electrical currents flying backwards and forwards, with the force of poems that have been well fought out and felt. I hear the currents of Alice Notley, of Bernadette Mayer, of Eileen Myles, and Sylvia Plath
Dorothea Lasky
#6. People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#7. She thought it was Sylvia Plath who'd said something about girls not being machines that you put kindness coins in until sex fell out,
Cole McCade
#8. You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
Toni Morrison
#9. 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
#10. Sylvia Plath is an example of the egotistical sublime: her subject is herself, her predicament, her violent Romantic emotions," wrote the poet Craig Raine.
Andrew Wilson
#11. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.
Anne Stevenson
#15. 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
#16. We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#17. And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression.
Megan McCafferty
#18. The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.
John Green
#19. 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
#20. Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am already.
Arlaina Tibensky
#21. 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
#22. It would be amazing to play Sylvia Plath. She was so dark, and what came out of her writing was troubled and fierce. The dimensions, levels, layers and levels would be incredible to take on.
Evangeline Lilly
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. To her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice ... Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
#26. Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.
Joni Mitchell
#27. Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.
Woody Allen
#28. 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
#29. Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
Sylvia Plath
#30. Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.
Sylvia Plath
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. 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
#39. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
Sylvia Plath
#40. I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
Sylvia Plath
#41. 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
#43. Talking about my fears to others feeds it.
Sylvia Plath
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.
Sylvia Plath
#47. I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.
Sylvia Plath
#48. 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
#49. Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Sylvia Plath
#50. 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
#51. Though it's quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.
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. 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
#54. 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
#55. If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.
Sylvia Plath
#56. Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962
Sylvia Plath
#57. 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
#58. When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
Sylvia Plath
#59. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.
Sylvia Plath
#60. Shut up in public those bloody private wounds.
Sylvia Plath
#62. The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird.
Sylvia Plath
#63. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
#64. In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.
Sylvia Plath
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception.
Sylvia Plath
#68. My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.
Sylvia Plath
#69. 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
#70. The frost makes a flower,
the dew makes a star.
Sylvia Plath
#71. 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
#72. There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Ted Hughes
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.
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 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
#80. Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream
Sylvia Plath
#81. 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
#82. 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
#84. For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
#85. One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.
Sylvia Plath
#87. Curled in the cavernous leather chair and faced Doctor Gordon across an acre of highly polished desk. Doctor
Sylvia Plath
#88. 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
#89. If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.
Sylvia Plath
#90. Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.
Sylvia Plath
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.
Sylvia Plath
#95. 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
#96. I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
Sylvia Plath
#97. This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
Sylvia Plath
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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