Sylvia Plath Quotes

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

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

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.

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

I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

They would grow old. They would forget me.

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured...with an informed and intelligent mind.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing.

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 tulips are too red...they hurt me.

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.

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

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.

I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.

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.

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.

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?

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

No day is safe from news of you.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

Everything in life is writable.

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

Happy! That is indefinable as far as states of being go.

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

It never occurred to me to say no.

Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.

I guess they call it suicide, but I'm to full to swallow my pride I can't stand losing you The Police Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little.