In Time Sylvia Quotes & Sayings

Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending. — Sylvia Plath

There is still time to veer, to sally forth, knapsack on back, for unknown hills over which ... only the wind knows what lies. Shall she, shall she veer? There will be time, she says, knowing that in her beginning is her end and the seeds of destruction perhaps now dormant may even today begin sprouting malignantly within her. She turns away from action in one direction to that in another, knowing all the while that some day she must face, behind the door of her choosing, perhaps the lady, perhaps the tiger ... — Sylvia Plath

We are all dangling in mid-process between what already happened (which is just a memory) and what might happen (which is just an idea). Now is the only time anything happens. When we are awake in our lives, we know what's happening. When we're asleep, we don't see what's right in front of us. — Sylvia Boorstein

In London, like in conches, Mr. MacDowell or MacDowness, time could be seen. Time was stamped in stone, in iron and in marble. And it was not only the buildings; people also occupied a place in the stratified flow of decades and centuries. — Sylvia Iparraguirre

Here's a practice idea for right now. Choose one of those sets of phrases. ... Plan on taking some time to say those words over and over, as you would an ardent prayer. Set some time aside for this. (Fifteen minutes would be a good start.) Then sit comfortably. Later on, you can say these phrases walking about or doing chores or even riding your bike--but for now, just sit. That way you can look at the words.
"Say each phrase as if you expect it will feel different in your mind--they are slightly different wishes--and feel how each of them echoes in your mind and body. [pp. 72-73] — Sylvia Boorstein

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. — Sylvia Plath

I was having such a hard time when I made Sylvia. I gave everything I had for that role. It's one or two or three things I'm most proud of in terms of my work. But it was very dark. — Gwyneth Paltrow

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

Eva will be impressed, too. Bet you're counting on that heading into the weekend." Damn right. I would need all the points I could earn when I met up with Eva in San Diego. "She's about to go out of town. And you have to head into the conference room before they get too restless in there. I'll join you as soon as I can." He stood. "Yes, I heard. Your mother's here. Let the wedding insanity begin. Since you're free this weekend, how about we round up some of the usual suspects at my place tonight? It's been a while, and your bachelor days are numbered. Well, technically they're over, but no one else knows that." And he was bound by attorney-client privilege. It took me a beat to decide. "All right. What time?" "Eight-ish." I nodded, then caught Scott's eye. He got — Sylvia Day

The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind. In some cases - Dylan Thomas comes to mind, and Ross Lockridge and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath - the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. Art is a localized illness, usually benign - creative people tend to live a long time - sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge carefully ... because some of that stuff may not be dead. — Stephen King

There is this sweet spot in time when we have an opportunity to stop killing sharks and tunas and swordfish and other wildlife in the sea before it's too late. — Sylvia Earle

It's taken us a short time to change the nature of nature. In my lifetime, more change than during all preceding human history put together. — Sylvia Earle

discussing facts or culpability in the matter because the convictions are still on appeal. But I have been repeatedly asked why Sylvia did not just simply run away. I would suggest that by the time Sylvia told her sister she knew she was dying, she had reached profound apathy — John Dean

It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. 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 am possessive about time alone... — Sylvia Plath

What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind. — Sylvia Plath

I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences. — Sylvia Earle

On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle. — Sylvia Plath

The diversity of life on Earth, generally, is astonishing. But despite those large numbers, it's also important to recognize that every species, one way or another, is vulnerable to extinction. And in our time on Earth our impact on the diversity of life has been profound. — Sylvia Earle

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

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

The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [ ... ]
The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. — Sylvia Plath

Never again will we have this good a chance as we now have to find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive. It's a sweet spot in history. That's why this is such a critical time. — Sylvia Earle

A profile, a look, a voice, can capture a heart in no time at all. — Sylvia Nasar

I couldn't stand was Buddy's pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure, when all the time he'd been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing in my face. — Sylvia Plath

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again. Let there be continuity at least - a core of consistency - even if your philosophy must be always a moving dynamic dialectic. The thesis is the easy time, the happy time. The antithesis threatens annihilation. The synthesis is the consummate problem. — Sylvia Plath

I can let you in, Eva. I'm trying. But your first response when I screw up is to run away. You do it every time and I can't stand feeling like any moment I'm going to do or say something wrong and you're going to bolt. — Sylvia Day

Let me not be sentimental, let the distance in time give me humor and irony and a shrewd, if loving, eye. — Sylvia Plath

Success underwater depends mostly on how you conduct yourself. Diving can be the most relaxing experience in the world. Your weight seems to disappear. Space travel will be available only to a few individuals for some time, but the oceans are available to almost everyone - now. — Sylvia Earle

My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this. — Jacqueline Woodson

Contentment and happiness didn't exist in my life for more than a few moments at a time, and they were really only illusionary. There was always something hidden. Lying in wait to spring up and ruin everything. — Sylvia Day

They missed every time, and with that wary judgment that comes with experience, I watched the dirty snowballs coming at me, behind and in front, and, sick with wonder, kept walking slowly, determinedly, ready to parry a good hit before it struck. But none struck, and with a tolerant smile that was a superior lie, I walked on. — Sylvia Plath

You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run - and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. — Sylvia Plath

Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they've spent time in and around the ocean, and they've personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet's blue heart. — Sylvia Earle

I liked looking on 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. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time. — Sylvia Plath

I do not agree with you," insisted Georyn. "Must a man then live always as his fellows live, and never reach beyond? There is more to knowledge than you dream of, Terwyn, and if it lies in some enchanted realm- well, I think that there is a door to that realm. And I think that the Enchantress knows where the door is and can open it."
"Perhaps; but will she leave it open? Think, Georyn: even if she should let you look for such a door, the time will surely come when it will be sealed again; and when that happens you will not be on her side of it, but on ours. How will you feel then? Let us accept her help against the Dragon, but no more- for we are men, not wizards"
"I am not sure," said Georyn, "that there is such a difference between the two. — Sylvia Louise Engdahl

Breathe," he ordered gently. "Once more time. Now, reassure me that's not panic." "Not really. No." "Talk to me, Eva." "I just ... " I blurted it out in a rush. "I want you to ask when I can say yes."
Tension gripped his body. He leaned back, his eyes wounded beneath his frown. "You couldn't say yes no?"
I shook my head.
His mouth thinned into a determined line. "Lay out what you need from me to make that happen. — Sylvia Day

I want to love somebody because I want to be loved. In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of the wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home. I have lived in boxes above, below, and down the hall from girls who think hard, feel similarly, and long companionably, and I have not bothered to cultivate them because I did not want to, could not, sacrifice the time. People know who I am, and the harder I try to know who they are, the more I forget their names - I want to be alone, and yet there are times when the liquid eye and the cognizant grin of a small monkey would send me into a crying fit of brotherly love. I work and think alone. I live with people, and act. I love and cherish both. If I knew now what I wanted I would know when I saw it, who he was. — Sylvia Plath

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. — Sylvia Plath

I'm not going to have what I want from you until you've reached the end of the road with him. I've got all the time in the world. I can wait 'til you get there. — Sylvia Day

You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint. — Sylvia Plath

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. — Sylvia Plath

This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go. — Sylvia Plath

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. — Sylvia Plath

I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred. — Sylvia Beach

The film was made in 1973. It was a golden time for people to experiment without risking, for example, AIDS. Today one has to be so much more careful and I don't think a character like that could exist now. — Sylvia Kristel

We want to think of ourselves as truly special creatures that are unique in the universe and, well, we are. And we have that capacity to wonder, to question, and to see ourselves in the context of all of life that has preceded the present time, and all that will go off far into the future, one way or another. — Sylvia Earle

I don't blame you. But if there's anything else you have to tell me, now would be the time."
He pressed forward, urging me to stretch on the couch. Coming over me, he whispered, "I'm in love with you."
With everything going wrong, that was the one thing that was totally right.
It was enough. — Sylvia Day

In the course of our eternal existence, we spend infinitely more time in the spirit world on the other side than we spend in the human world on earth. — Sylvia Browne

I wish you could see the two cats drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementarily adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it's their supper time. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. — Sylvia Earle

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

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 seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. — Sylvia Plath

There is a period in one's life - perhaps not longer than six months - when one lives in two worlds at once ... It is the time when one has freshly learned to read. The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity, transparent and unseizable as a jellyfish, yet able to create an independent world that is both more recondite and more instantaneously convincing than the world one knew before. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

This month is fit for little.
The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
A red tongue is among us.
Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
I am becoming another.
Dog-head, devourer:
Feed me the berries of dark.
The lids won't shut. Time
Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
its endless glitter.
I must swallow it all.
Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat-
Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?
In this light the blood is black.
Tell me my name. — Sylvia Plath

If too much has been made of the symptoms of Plath's mental illness, so too little attention has been paid to its possible causes. Sylvia Plath was an angry young woman born in a country and at a time that only exacerbated and intensified her fury. — Andrew Wilson

Why do you make our case (which is hell enough, and we have enough to test us in these coming cruel years) so utterly and absolutely rigid? I can take the even harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near. — Sylvia Plath

She wanted to believe him so much, but fear held her in its grasp more firmly than ever before. And if she made the wrong decision, she would have to live with the result for the rest of her life. That could be a long time and she'd already made one wrong choice regarding marriage and love. What if she made another? She sat there remembering the way he'd been good to her children, the way he'd made love to her that first time, soothing her fears. She remembered how he'd finally begun to teach her the shipping business, the impromptu baseball game with Philip, the picnic in her office, the trip to his family home, and all the little things that made her laugh. From the very first he'd been kind to her, while lying repeatedly regarding the business. The business seemed to be his Achilles' heel and he'd just given it to her. — Sylvia McDaniel

Father Consett sighed.
'I told you this was an evil place,' he said. 'In the deep forests. She'd not have such evil thoughts in another place.' Mrs Satterthwaite said:
'I'd rather you didn't say that, Father. Sylvia would have evil thoughts in any place.'
'Sometimes,' the priest said, 'at night I think I hear the claws of evil things scratching on the shutters. This was the last place in Europe to be Christianised. Perhaps it wasn't ever even Christianised and they're here yet.'
Mrs Satterthwaite said:
'It's all very well to talk like that in the day-time. It makes the place seem romantic. But it must be near one at night. And things are bad enough as it is.'
'They are,' Father Consett said. 'The devil's at work. — Ford Madox Ford

The opportunity that is unique [to our] time is what inspires me to do everything I can to move things forward. This is the first time that we have the capacity to understand our place in the greater scheme of things to the extent that we do. — Sylvia Earle

Perhaps ... these days of less sunlight are opportunities for more contemplative time, more looking deeply to see what can only be seen in the dark. — Sylvia Boorstein

The fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage ... — Sylvia Pankhurst

I've had sex before with the belt on. That was back in the Ricco Rodriguez days. The night I won the belt I had a sexual experience with the belt on. But hey, I was 25 years old and it was the biggest thing that ever had happened to me in my life. The girl was like hey, are you going to take that thing off. And I said no, I'm not ... I'm wearing it and if you have a problem with it, then I'm leaving. And I hate to say it, but if I do win the belt again, then this time it's never coming off. I'm going to wear it a lot more. — Tim Sylvia

Are you sleeping with anyone?"
The question was asked so casually it took a second to process what he'd said.
I inhaled sharply. "Why is that any business of yours?"
He looked at me and I saw what I'd seen the first time we'd met - tremendous power and steely control. Both of which had me taking an involuntary step back. Again. At least I didn't fall this time; I was making progress.
"Because I want to fuck you, Eva. I need to know what's standing in my way, if anything. — Sylvia Day

He sighed. "She was a mistake in every sense. She made herself available once, and I make it a rule to avoid overly eager women a second time."
"And that doesn't make you sound like an asshole at all. — Sylvia Day

Men still assume I must be like the girl I played in 'Emmanuelle.' John Wayne was never accused of killing people during his free time, but I'm forever stuck with the image of 'Emmanuelle.' The truth is, I should have got an Oscar for that role because I'm nothing like that woman. — Sylvia Kristel

My first breath was just ... it just seemed impossible that you could actually breathe underwater. I knew in my mind it was possible, but actually experiencing it was such a gulp of joy and I feel it every time I go under the ocean. I love doing it, to be able to feel weightless, to spin on one finger, to do somersaults, to be like a graceful ballerina - even with a huge tank on your back you can do the most extraordinary things. — Sylvia Earle

This is a living planet. Look around. Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Look beyond our solar system. Where else is there a place that works, that is just right for the likes of us? It has not happened just instantly. It is vulnerable to our actions. But it's the result of four and a half billion years of evolution, of change over time. And it changes every day, all the time. It would be in our interest to try to maintain a certain level of stability that has enabled us to prosper, to not wreck the very systems that give us life. — Sylvia Earle

Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?"
My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.
It's almost three in the afternoon."
I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that. — Sylvia Plath

Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life. — Sylvia Earle