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Sylvia Plath
70 quotes
“I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You said you would kill it this morning. Do not kill it. It startles me still, The jut of that odd, dark head, pacingThrough the uncut grass on the elm's hill. It is something to own a pheasant, Or just to be visited at all.I am not mystical: it isn't As if I thought it had a spirit. It is simply in its element.That gives it a kingliness, a right.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Aurelia Plath (August 21, 1962)
“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (February 19, 1950)
“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 (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (July 7, 1950)
“It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (July 6, 1950)
“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (July 8, 1950)
“The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (July 17, 1950)
“Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1950 entry, quoted in Gayle Wurst, Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1999), p. 158
“If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1950 entry, quoted in Kate Moses, "The Real Sylvia Plath," Salon.com (June 1, 2000)
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (December 1955), quoted in Joyce Carol Oates, "Raising Lady Lazarus," The New York Times (November 5, 2000)
“I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (March 1, 1956)
“I am made, crudely, for success.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (April 22, 1958)
“Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (April 22, 1958)
“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journal entry from July 1950 – 1953, p. 63 of the original, p. 55 of the collection
“The abstract kills, the concrete saves.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (January 7, 1959)
“Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. 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 (1932–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I didn't feel like asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake. I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over — dead white, of course, with no makeup and form the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?" Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless 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 at.”
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source