Sylvia Plath Quotes

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance.

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.

The lawn was white with doctors

I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that.

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.

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself ... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. Last night, driving back from Boston, I lay back in the car and let the colored lights come at me, the music from the radio, the reflection of the guy driving. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain ... 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. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

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

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.

I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.

It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.

There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart - It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

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

Don't let the wicked city get you down.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

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.

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

I'm happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

I collect men with interesting names.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

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

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.

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

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

But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

I think I made you up inside my head.

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I wondered what I thought I was burying.

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

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.

I think I may well be a Jew.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing.

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.