Letters Of Sylvia Plath Quotes

I am sitting in my room, looking out at a scene of snow pouring down with ice and sleet and thinking of how sometimes people are really wonderful after all. ~ Sylvia Plath

Your security and love of life don't depend on the presence of another, but only on yourself, your chosen work, and your developing identity. Then you can safely choose to enrich your life by marrying another person, and not, as e e cummings says, until. ~ Sylvia Plath

Had Prozac been available last century, Baudelaire's "spleen," Edgar Allan Poe's moods, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the lamentations of so many other poets, everything with a soul would have been silenced*....
If large pharmaceutical companies were able to eliminate the seasons, they would probably do so--for profit, of course.

*This does not mean that Sylvia Plath should not have been medicated at all. The point is that pathologies should be medicated when there is risk of suicide, not mood swings. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Death may whiten in sun or out of it. ~ Sylvia Plath

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... ~ Sylvia Plath

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust? ~ Sylvia Plath

New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. ~ Sylvia Plath

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

There I went again, building p a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few posy nothings. ~ Sylvia Plath

Brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on. ~ Sylvia Plath

My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow? ~ Sylvia Plath

I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction. ~ Sylvia Plath

And when the balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump - ~ Sylvia Plath

In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire. ~ Sylvia Plath

The simple fact is that people who achieve excellence in their fields didn't just have a dream. They got up at 4:00 am to practice on parallel bars or had to forgo other desirable activities and paths in order to get in six hours of violin practice a day, or stayed off several million absurd writing advice blogs with their overheated little cliques that dispense useless regurgitated maxims and empty praise and decide to actually confront their own thoughts on a page. Or they read Beowulf and Dante carefully and deeply when they didn't see any point, since all they were interested in was Sylvia Plath, because someone of more experience and wisdom told them to do so. I don't know whether we're overly lazy, stupid, or childish these days. But the idea of preparing oneself for excellence has somehow disappeared. So – my advice to dreamers: Don't just follow your dreams. Earn them. Do what it takes to achieve it. Work for it. Don't just sit there and dream because if you do, it will never, ever be yours. ~ Harrison Solow

I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a dayspare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. ~ Sylvia Plath

Endure, endure, and the syllables harden like stoic white sheets struck with rigor mortis on the clothesline of winter. ~ Sylvia Plath

I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with. ~ Sylvia Plath

How can I go, meeting and exorcising my own ghosts here! I've made some new ones now. ~ Sylvia Plath

I'm sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I'm still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt. ~ Sylvia Plath

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

You oughtn't to see this," Will muttered in my ear. "You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't to let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race. ~ Sylvia Plath

..it just seems that I am running on a purposeless treadmill, behind and paralyzed in science, dreading every day of the horrible year ahead when I should be reveling in my major. ~ Sylvia Plath

I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies - for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips. ~ Sylvia Plath

I am incapable of more knowledge. ~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath"
A miniature mad talent? Sylvia Plath,
who'll wipe off the spit of your integrity,
rising in the saddle to slash at Auschwitz,
life tearing this or that, I am a woman?
Who'll lay the graduate girl in marriage,
queen bee, naked, unqueenly, shaming her shame?
Each English major saying, "I am Sylvia,
I hate marriage, I must hate babies."
Even men have a horror of giving birth,
mother-sized babies splitting us in half,
sixty thousand American infants a year,
U.I.D., Unexplained Infant Deaths,
born physically whole and hearty, refuse to live,
Sylvia ... the expanding torrent of your attack. ~ Robert Lowell

I am a part of all that I have met. To you, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something. There is nothing but that it will suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Through me transmuted. ~ Sylvia Plath

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow. ~ Sylvia Plath

My world falls apart, crumbles, "The centre cannot hold." There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom - I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go. ~ Sylvia Plath

I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. ~ Sylvia Plath

The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words. ~ Sylvia Plath

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

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. ~ Sylvia Plath

With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be. ~ Sylvia Plath

I know what you're thinking. 'How the hell does this broke ass piece of trailer trash know words like caveat,' right? Well guess what? I've read every single book on the New York Times list of 'Top 100 Literary Classics,' not to mention every Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Bronte sisters' book ever written. And fuck you very much for judging me, by the way. ~ Isobel Irons

Then bed, and again the luxury of dark. Still the blood and flesh of me were electric and singing quietly. But it ebbed and ebbed and dark and sleep and oblivion came and came, surging, surging, surging inward, lapping and drowning with no-name, no-identity, none at all. Just nothing, yet the seeds of awakening and life slumbered there in the dark ~ Sylvia Plath

I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted. I really do not think deeply. really deeply. I want a romantic nonexistant hero. ~ Sylvia Plath

Poppies in July
Little 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 you
Flickering 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. ~ Sylvia Plath

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. ~ Sylvia Plath

I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence ... luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged. ~ Sylvia Plath

And so I stand, a little sightless. So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful. ~ Sylvia Plath

She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone. ~ Sylvia Plath

but the very content that comes from finding yourself is overshadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesque, but a special kind of grotesque. ~ Sylvia Plath

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. ~ Sylvia Plath

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh ... Robert Schumann has been mentioned ... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath ... some of them with rather grim ends. ~ Stephen Fry

A heavy naughtiness pricked through my veins, irritating and attractive as the hurt of a loose tooth. ~ Sylvia Plath

Paralytic

It happens. Will it go on? ----
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung

That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not

Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
The night brings violets,
Tapestries of eyes,

Lights,
The soft anonymous
Talkers: 'You all right?'
The starched, inaccessible breast.

Dead egg, I lie
Whole
On a whole world I cannot touch,
At the white, tight

Drum of my sleeping couch
Photographs visit me ----
My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,
Mouth full of pearls,

Two girls
As flat as she, who whisper 'We're your daughters.'
The still waters
Wrap my lips,

Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack.
On my bare back

I smile, a buddha, all
Wants, desire
Falling from me like rings
Hugging their lights.

The claw
Of the magnolia,
Drunk on its own scents,
Asks nothing of life. ~ Sylvia Plath

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers
goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat. ~ Sylvia Plath

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. ~ Andy Behrman