Sylvia Plath Quotes

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.

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

What did my arms do before they held you?

…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.

And I, love, am a pathological liar.

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.

O heart, such disorganization!

I think that as far as language goes I'm an American, I'm afraid, my accent is American, my way of talk is an American way of talk, I'm an old-fashioned American. That's probably one of the reasons why I'm in England now and why I'll always stay in England.

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

I like people, but to learn about one individual always appeals to me more than anything.

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

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

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn’t help it and didn’t know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

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

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

There was a beautiful time.

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.

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, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

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.

In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

What is so real as the cry of a child?

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

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.

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 lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

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.

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy & peaceful.