Plath Quotes

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in. ~ Sylvia Plath

I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the while he thought he was so smart. ~ Sylvia Plath

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed. ~ Sylvia Plath

The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper. ~ Sylvia Plath

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage -
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. ~ Sylvia Plath

But perhaps the most overlooked feature of her life was that she was human, and therefore fallible. ~ Sylvia Plath

... * 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. ~ Sylvia Plath

An unfinished feeling. ~ Sylvia Plath

Something in me wants more. I can't rest. ~ Sylvia Plath

I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart. ~ Sylvia Plath

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm ~ Sylvia Plath

Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play "Goodbye My Fancy," of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself. ~ Sylvia Plath

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart? ~ Sylvia Plath

This is newness: every little tawdry
Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,
Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you
Don'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 new
To want the world in a glass hat. ~ Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. ~ Sylvia Plath

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

I am I because of that. ~ Sylvia Plath

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists ~ Sylvia Plath

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. ~ Sylvia Plath

The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights. ~ Sylvia Plath

The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth's crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonomous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity. ~ Sylvia Plath

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven - and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive - nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking. ~ Sylvia Plath

The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath. ~ John Green

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. ~ Sylvia Plath

I hate it, find it hideous, loathsome. I have built it up to a devouring, malicious monster. I am letting it ruin my whole life. My reason is leaving me, and I want to get out of this. ~ Sylvia Plath

Shut up in public those bloody private wounds. ~ 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

So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something. ~ Sylvia Plath

If you have no past or no future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots, 'I think, therefore I am,' whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait. ~ Sylvia Plath

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

"I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 ~ Sylvia Plath

The frost makes a flower,
the dew makes a star. ~ Sylvia Plath

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

My mind is killing me
- The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind ~ Charlotte Eriksson

You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. ~ Sylvia Plath

A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration ~ Sylvia Plath

The day I went into physics class it was death. ~ Sylvia Plath

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

I am both worse and better than you thought. ~ Sylvia Plath

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you. ~ Sylvia Plath

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep. ~ Sylvia Plath

And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons. ~ Sylvia Plath

TB is like living with a bomb in your lungs. You just lie around very quietly hoping it won't go off ~ Sylvia Plath

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. ~ Sylvia Plath

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers. ~ Sylvia Plath

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do. ~ Sylvia Plath

Mother of otherness,
Eat me.
--from "Poem for a Birthday - Who", written 1960 ~ Sylvia Plath

Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes - A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers. Even our shadows are blue with cold. We wanted to see the sun come up And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship, Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost, Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay Encased in a glassy pellicle. The ~ Sylvia Plath

She thought it was Sylvia Plath who'd said something about girls not being machines that you put kindness coins in until sex fell out, ~ Cole McCade

Is that life after death - mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? ~ Sylvia Plath

This hotel-the Amazon- was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn't get at them and deceive them. ~ Sylvia Plath

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable. ~ Sylvia Plath

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. ~ Sylvia Plath

I thought the small letter at the start might mean that nothing ever really began all new, with a capital, but that it just flowed on from what came before. ~ Sylvia Plath

Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves.
All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting. ~ Sylvia Plath

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could. ~ Sylvia Plath

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar. ~ Sylvia Plath

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off. ~ Sylvia Plath

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars,
the trees and flowers were strewing
their cool odos. There was no moon. ~ Sylvia Plath

In the heart of the forest your image follows me ~ Sylvia Plath

Now I know how people can live without books, without college. ( ... )and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more ... ~ Sylvia Plath

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. ~ Sylvia Plath

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

--written 1960 ~ Sylvia Plath

The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence ~ Sylvia Plath

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road. ~ Sylvia Plath

Talking about my fears to others feeds it. ~ Sylvia Plath

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. ~ Sylvia Plath

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development - part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" - has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so - and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few - have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author. ~ James Shapiro

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness. ~ Sylvia Plath

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? ~ Sylvia Plath

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it. ~ Sylvia Plath

[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning. ~ Al Alvarez

I can only end up with one, and I must leave many lonely by the wayside. So that is all for now. Perhaps someday someone will leave me by the wayside. And that will be poetic justice. ~ Sylvia Plath

I am the magician's girl who does not flinch. ~ 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

Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. ~ Sylvia Plath

They might ignore me immediately.
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. ~ Sylvia Plath

I wondered what I thought I was burying. ~ Sylvia Plath

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I. ~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally. ~ Anne Stevenson

My room is a twittering gray box with a wall / there and there and there again. ~ Sylvia Plath

There is nothing like ~ Sylvia Plath

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

Rain on roof outside window, gray light, deep covers and warm blankets. Rain and nip of autumn in air; nostalgia, itch to work better and bigger. That crisp edge of autumn. ~ Sylvia Plath

It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt) ~ Sylvia Plath

It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at. ~ Sylvia Plath

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. ~ Sylvia Plath

There was a beautiful time... ~ Sylvia Plath

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from. ~ Sylvia Plath

You are still on your own; be stoic; don't panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing GIVING love of spring ... dawn came, black and white gray into a frozen hell.
I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live. ~ Sylvia Plath

My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart. ~ Sylvia Plath

God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. There is history to read... centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. Yet I know that back at the house there is my room, full of my presence. There is my date this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I'm lost. ~ Sylvia Plath

I collected men with interesting names. ~ Sylvia Plath

The two of them didn't even stop jitterbugging during the intervals. I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. ~ Sylvia Plath

I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth. ~ Sylvia Plath

Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead. ~ Sylvia Plath

daddy daddy you bastard, i'm through ~ Sylvia Plath

All I'd heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for. So I didn't really see the harm in anything Buddy would think up to do. ~ Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. ~ Sylvia Plath

Love Letter"

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just tow me an inch, no-
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter-
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chisled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,
But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I was was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Sylvia Plath