Quotes by Sylvia Plath
(Page 4 of 4)

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.

I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter-- they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery -- air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

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

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen.

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing -- and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

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.

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

I have a visual imagination.

I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

Every woman adores a Fascist.

I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

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've a call.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative -- whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land -- the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.

There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.

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

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

I am a victim of introspection.

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.