Quotes & Sayings About Plath

I don't know how long I kept at it ...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more — Sylvia Plath

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

I looked up from that churning amphitheater to the view beyond it.
The great, gray eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist-shrouded sun focusing
all the white and silent distances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to stall at my feet. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts. — Sylvia Plath

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

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. — Sylvia Plath

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

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. — Sylvia Plath

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. — Sylvia Plath

Death may whiten in sun or out of it. — Sylvia Plath

I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it. — Sylvia Plath

I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air. — Sylvia Plath

Love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart. — Sylvia Plath

Mental nausea of daily squash
flabby cauliflower
and grease dripping slick and sheepish
onto the placid plate of mind. — Sylvia Plath

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown. — Ted Hughes

There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood. — Ted Hughes

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like. — Sylvia Plath

I know what you're thinking. 'How the hell does this broke ass piece of trailer trash know words like caveat,' right? Well guess what? I've read every single book on the New York Times list of 'Top 100 Literary Classics,' not to mention every Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Bronte sisters' book ever written. And fuck you very much for judging me, by the way. — Isobel Irons

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in. — Sylvia Plath

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life. — Sylvia Plath

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. — Andy Behrman

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath

Jay Cee's ugly as sin. — Sylvia Plath

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them. — Sylvia Plath

I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart. — Sylvia Plath

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning. — James Plath

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready. — Sylvia Plath

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault. — Sylvia Plath

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. — 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

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever. — Sylvia Plath

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.
From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954 — Sylvia Plath

Is anyone anywhere happy? — Sylvia Plath

All the gods know is destinations. — Sylvia Plath

And when the balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump - — Sylvia Plath

So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something. — Sylvia Plath

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. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... — Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

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. — Sylvia Plath

I need someone to pour myself into. — 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'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else. — Sylvia Plath

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew. — Sylvia Plath

How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die? — Sylvia Plath

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

So what do you think?' He asked, holding up the book.
'I think Salinger is a closet paedophile,' I replied placidly and was surprised and comforted by this minuscule, acidic, bitter Sylvia Plath like mocking, sniping tone that had crept into my voice. 'The main character Seymour is a fully grown man and a pervert who befriends young girls with his storytelling and swimming, just to get close enough to groom them in preparation for the inevitable sexual assault he lusts after. You might have noticed for example in A Perfect Day For Bananafish he grabs the young girls-'
'Sybil.'
'He grabs Sybil's ankles while lying on the beach and again when he pushes her in the water,' I continued. 'He goes too far when he kisses the bottom of her foot which makes even a four-year-old yell out in fear, knowing a line had been crossed. Frustrated Seymour walks away and goes back to his hotel where he kills himself in shame. — J.D. Gallagher

I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world. How much of my solicitude for other human beings is real and honest, how much is a feigned lacquer painted on by society, I do not know. — Sylvia Plath

There is nothing like — Sylvia Plath

Over your body the clouds go
High, high and icily
And a little flat, as if they
Floated on a glass that was invisible.
Unlike swans,
Having no reflections;
Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
All cool, all blue. Unlike you
You, there on your back,
Eyes to the sky. — Sylvia Plath

I think I made you up inside my head. — Sylvia Plath

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls. — Sylvia Plath

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. — 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

A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk ...
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. — 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

We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate. — Sylvia Plath

All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me. — Sylvia Plath

On Fridays the little children come To trade their hooks for hands. Dead men leave eyes for others. Love is the uniform of my bald nurse. Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. The vase, reconstructed, houses The elusive rose. Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows. My mendings itch. There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new. — Sylvia Plath

And we, too, had a relationship
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also. — Sylvia Plath

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself. — Sylvia Plath

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

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere. — Sylvia Plath

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium. — Sylvia Plath

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc? — Sylvia Plath

Already she feels jaded. Weary, and gladly tired and old. — Sylvia Plath

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks --

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows. — Sylvia Plath

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
From the poem "Elm", 19 April 1962 — Sylvia Plath

Remember how you asked me where would I like to live best, the country or the city?"
"And you said ... "
"And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both? — Sylvia Plath

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

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

Five balls! Five bright brass balls!
To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls. — Sylvia Plath

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat ... I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. — Sylvia Plath

Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. — Sylvia Plath

You know what lies are for. — Sylvia Plath

I think I may well be a Jew. — Sylvia Plath

I wondered what I thought I was burying. — Sylvia Plath

I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? - - - That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am? — Sylvia Plath

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful. — Sylvia Plath

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

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls. — Sylvia Plath

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road. — Sylvia Plath

Wind warns November's done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious. — Sylvia Plath

There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow. — Sylvia Plath

Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. — Sylvia Plath

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living - a set of values. — Sylvia Plath

In the heart of the forest your image follows me — Sylvia Plath

No day is safe from news of you. — Sylvia Plath

... I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me. — Sylvia Plath

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

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies. — 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 feel stuffy, as if there were not enough air to breathe - hot, and uneasy. Two months of no exercise have made me weak and plegmatic mentally and physically. On the short walk from here to the libe I drink the cold pure night air and the clear unbelievably delicate crescent-moonlight with a greedy reverence. Days are bizarre collections of hothouse languidities, mystical and poignant sensuous quotations (white thy fambles, red thy gan, and thy quarrons dainty is ... " Dark, liquid loveliness of words half dimly understood.) — Sylvia Plath

I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated. — Sylvia Plath

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars,
the trees and flowers were strewing
their cool odos. There was no moon. — Sylvia Plath

So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.
The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallen
Dream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,
The other face, the real, staring upwards. — Ted Hughes

I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day - spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. ( ... ) I want, I think, to be omniscient ... I think I would like to call myself "The girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be - perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I - I am powerful - but to what extent? I am I. — Sylvia Plath