Sylvia Plath Quotes

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

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

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.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

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

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

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.

I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

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

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.

My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks.

That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

I am made, crudely, for success.

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

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.)

What did my arms do before they held you?

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it.

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

I woke to the sound of rain.

A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

I dream too much, work too little.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing.

Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

The tulips are too red...they hurt me.

I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

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

As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.