Sylvia Plath Quotes

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.

What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many…?

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

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

I felt wise and cynical as all hell.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry.

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

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.

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

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

You know what lies are for.

I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

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.

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

…beating time along the edge of thought.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

Like a cat I have nine times to die.

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.

I want to be silverly beautiful.

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

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.

Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal.

I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off.

The lawn was white with doctors

I wondered what I thought I was burying.

You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.

Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God

I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead.

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit.

If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.

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