Sylvia Plath Quotes

Biography

Type: Poet and Writter

Born: October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U

Died: February 11, 1963 (aged 30), London, Eng

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s student at Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.

Sylvia Plath Quotes

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences. Sylvia Plath
let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a
Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel
I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest
How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most
Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and,
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.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.. Sylvia Plath
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white
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.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of
How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation
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.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through
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.

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

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would
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.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.. Sylvia Plath
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me
Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

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.

Ready for a new life

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

I am not cruel -
only truthful.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery - air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

Is anyone anywhere happy?

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.

From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence.

Dying is an art.
Like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

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.

I’ll never speak to God again.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole-
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

God, who am I?

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

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it.

O love, how did you get here?

-Nick and the Candlestick

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

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

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue

The still waters
Wrap my lips,

Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack.

brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then -

Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

There was a beautiful time...

Seré una de las pocas poetisas en el mundo completamente feliz de ser mujer, no una de esas amargadas y frustradas, retorcidas imitadoras de hombres, que en su mayoría acaban destrozadas

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse

This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars ...

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

And 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.

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.

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.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions are different from a women's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly.

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.

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?"
Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness.

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?

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.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

The future is what matters - because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present - like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

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

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

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

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."
I looked at her. "Like what?"
"Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up
and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)

Dziewicza strona, biała. Pierwsza skalana i odrzucona. Wszystkie te marzenia, obietnice: czekanie, aż będę mogła znowu pisać, a potem bolesny, sfuszerowany gwałt na pierwszej kartce.

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