Sylvia Plath Quotes

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.

…beating time along the edge of thought.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.

The tulips are too red...they hurt me.

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many…?

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.

Character is fate.

The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

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 want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

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

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.

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit.

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady . . . I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing 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.

Happy! That is indefinable as far as states of being go.

If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

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.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

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 life. And I am horribly limited.

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

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

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse.

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

You know what lies are for.

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.

I like people too much or not at all.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

One night she hid the pink cotton scarf from her raincoat in the pillowcase when the nurse came around to lock up her drawers and closets for the night. In the dark she had made a loop and tried to pull it tight around her throat. But always just as the air stopped coming and she felt the rushing grow louder in her ears, her hands would slacken and let go, and she would lie there panting for breath, cursing the dumb instinct in her body that fought to go on living

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

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

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.