Sylvia Plath Quotes & Sayings

At the local coffee-shop, hunched in one of the secretive, high-backed booths with hundreds of peoples' names gouged into the wood, we drank cup after cup of black coffee and talked frankly about sex. — Sylvia Plath

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

I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the proper sort of man. — Sylvia Plath

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill. — Sylvia Plath

It flew straight down — Sylvia Plath

I need someone real, who will be right for me now, here, and soon. Until then I'm lost. I think I am mad at times. — Sylvia Plath

Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen.' [ ... ] I sat like that for about an hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot doll in her mother's old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well. — Sylvia Plath

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live. — Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. — Sylvia Plath

The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, "I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound," which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast. — Sylvia Plath

Reality is what I make it. That is what I have said I believed. Then I look at the hell I am wallowing in, nerves paralyzed, action nullified - fear, envy, hate: all the corrosive emotions of insecurity biting away at my sensitive guts. Time, experience: the colossal wave, sweeping tidal over me, drowning, drowning. How can I ever find that permanence, that continuity with past and future, that communication with other human beings that I crave? Can I ever honestly accept an artificial imposed solution? How can I justify, how can I rationalize the rest of my life away? — Sylvia Plath

... historians will say 'We have a few documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men. — Sylvia Plath

daddy daddy you bastard, i'm through — Sylvia Plath

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company. — Sylvia Plath

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences — Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again. — Sylvia Plath

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. — Sylvia Plath

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 never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. — Sylvia Plath

The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper. — Sylvia Plath

I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak. — Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. — Sylvia Plath

When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete. — Sylvia Plath

My world falls apart, crumbles, "The centre cannot hold." There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom - I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go. — Sylvia Plath

Perry said today that his mother said "Girls look for infinite security; boys look for a mate. Both look for different things." I am at odds. dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man. In other words, I must pour my energies through the direction and force of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate. And yet, it is as I feared: I am becoming adjusted and accustomed to that idea. And if I could be your companion I would laugh at those previous fears. I like what you heighten in me. And I am amazed that I, so proud and distainful of custom, could consider marriage an honorable and vital estate. But under certain circumstances I do justly consider it that. — Sylvia Plath

As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention. If I had been born of Italian parents in one of the caves in the hills I would be a prostitute at the age of 12 or so because I had to live (why?) and that was the only way open. If I was born into a wealthy New York family with pseudo-cultural leanings, I would have had my coming-out party along with the rest of them, and be equipped with fur coats, social contacts, and a blase pout. How do I know? I don't; I can only guess. I wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of "I" that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratches on the paper ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I ... I. — Sylvia Plath

I craved him constantly, so deeply it was a physical ache — Sylvia Plath

All morning the
Morning has been blackening,
A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water. — Sylvia Plath

Loaded my black patent leather bag with sherry, cream cheese (for grammy's apricot tarts), thyme, basil, bay leaves (for Wendy's exotic stews - a facsimile of which now simmers on the stove), golden wafers (such an elegant name for Ritz crackers), apples and green pears.
I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke, for instance, or writing - I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter. — Sylvia Plath

... And so I could go on, into my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. Perhaps that would help, to synthesize my ideas into a philosophy for me... — Sylvia Plath

the incessant seethe of grasses — Sylvia Plath

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

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

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? 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. — Sylvia Plath

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? — Sylvia Plath

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three ... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth. — Sylvia Plath

I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.
Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet. — Sylvia Plath

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds. — Sylvia Plath

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"? — Sylvia Plath

conversing, in low tones, with the asylum librarian, an alumna — Sylvia Plath

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself... — Sylvia Plath

And times there are when you feel very wise and ageless. You are sunning on the rocks, the water splashing at your feet, when a small chubby freckle faced girl of about ten approaches you, her hand holding something that is invisible, but evidently quite precious. 'Do you know,' she asks earnestly, 'do starfish like hot or cold water best? — Sylvia Plath

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

Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have — Sylvia Plath

I am not cruel -
only truthful. — Sylvia Plath

The lawn was white with doctors — Sylvia Plath

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always. — Sylvia Plath

Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes - A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers. Even our shadows are blue with cold. We wanted to see the sun come up And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship, Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost, Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay Encased in a glassy pellicle. The — Sylvia Plath

Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out. — Sylvia Plath

I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual ... — Sylvia Plath

I liked looking at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. — Sylvia Plath

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get. — Sylvia Plath

Then bed, and again the luxury of dark. Still the blood and flesh of me were electric and singing quietly. But it ebbed and ebbed and dark and sleep and oblivion came and came, surging, surging, surging inward, lapping and drowning with no-name, no-identity, none at all. Just nothing, yet the seeds of awakening and life slumbered there in the dark — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying "Ah!" in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.
Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
And then, I thought, he would help me, step by step, to be myself again. — Sylvia Plath

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. — Sylvia Plath

Mother of otherness,
Eat me. — Sylvia Plath

We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape. — Sylvia Plath

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar. — Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish. — Sylvia Plath

I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham. — Sylvia Plath

There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace? — Sylvia Plath

the cat unsheathes its claws
the world turns — Sylvia Plath

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

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time. — Sylvia Plath

The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers
goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being bummed alive all along your nerves. — Sylvia Plath

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent. — Sylvia Plath

Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all - it's the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep. — Sylvia Plath

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews. — Sylvia Plath

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. — Sylvia Plath

I stepped on as many feet as I could because it took my mind off this enormous desire to puke that was ballooning up in front of me so fast I couldn't see round it. — Sylvia Plath

I self-paralyze myself & wonder what I've got in my head. — Sylvia Plath

Always him. Damn, what is the matter with me? Is it because I want somebody to orient myself about that I'm drawn to him, or am I drawn to him because he is exactly the sort of person I want to orient myself about? — Sylvia Plath

The box is only temporary. — Sylvia Plath

But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many ... ? — Sylvia Plath

Buddy hugged his father,and promptly, with a dreadful brightness, came over to me and held out his had.I shook it. It felt fat and moist. — Sylvia Plath

And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments. — Sylvia Plath

Is anyone anywhere happy? No, not unless they are living in a dream or in an artifice that they or someone else has made. For a time I was lulled in the arms of a blind organism with breasts full of champagne and nipples made of caviar. I thought she was true, and that the true was the beautiful. But the true is the ugly mixed up everywhere, like a peck of dirt scattered through your life. The true is that there is no security, no artifice to stop the unsavory changes, the rat race, the death unwish - the winged chariot, the horns and the motors, the Devil in the clock. Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods, but a rather pedestrian pair of muddled suburbanites who, no matter how bumbling they tried, never could quite understand how or why you grew up to your 21st birthday. — Sylvia Plath

After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture-chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and on all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces. — Sylvia Plath

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. — Sylvia Plath

What have I eaten? Lies and smiles. — Sylvia Plath

And I think as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault — Sylvia Plath

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn't matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more. — Sylvia Plath

The big men are all deaf; they don't want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street on cleated boots. — Sylvia Plath

Of the ear, old worrier. Water mollifies the flint lip, And daylight lays its sameness on the wall. The grafters are cheerful, Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers. A current agitates the wires Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures. A workman walks by carrying a pink torso. The storerooms are full of hearts. This is the city of spare parts. My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber. Here they can doctor heads, or any limb. — Sylvia Plath

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. — Sylvia Plath

There are a few times when the songs that are written, the poems that are written, the plays that are written, come alive. By accident you fall onto a stage-set put aside for a tragedy for the lesser gods, and you utter words that were in the script written in the leaves and in the grass for some heroic cast. — Sylvia Plath

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

Then I thought, No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, [ ... ] and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attilla and a pack of other lovers with queer names [ ... ] I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest ... — Sylvia Plath

I could tell Marco was a woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards. — Sylvia Plath

I used to pray to recover you. — Sylvia Plath