Sylvia Plath Quotes
The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down.
The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.
I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.
I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can't put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can't!
let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
I don't see, ' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.
Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
I love the people, ' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.
But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?
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.
You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.
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.
Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
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.
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.
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.
Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?
Stars open among the lilies.Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?This is the silence of astounded souls.
I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The still watersWrap my lips, Eyes, nose and ears, A clearCellophane I cannot crack.
But artists didn't need to achieve "firsts", and Hughes wanted to be an artist.
In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars ...
And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.
My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.
What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.
the name of the husband is one of the strongest insignia of patriarchal power
I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.
They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.
...she could not stick by the golden mean...was always anxious to experiment in extremes...to find out what was enough by indulging herself in too much." (Gordon Lameyer)
