Sylvia Plath Quotes

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

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

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.

Is anyone anywhere happy?

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

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

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.

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.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming "Traitor, sinner, imposter.

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.

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.

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.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

I am your opus.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

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

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

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

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

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

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.

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.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 onto 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.

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face.But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots.The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.

I woke to the sound of rain.

All the gods know is destinations.

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.

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 don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

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

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

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

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then 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.

Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?If I could bleed, or sleep!If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling.But colorless. Colorless.

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.

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?

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.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

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.

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars ...

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. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.