Sylvia Plath Quotations

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

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

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

Is there no way out of the mind?

I am too pure for you or anyone.

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.

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

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.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

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

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

How we need another soul to cling to.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

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

What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

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.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

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 talk to God but the sky is empty.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

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

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

What I want back is what I was.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.

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

One soul passes through the other, frail as smokeAnd utterly ignorant of the way it took.

I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a date on a tombstone.

What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And eat men like air

Tree and Stone glittered, without shadows.My finger-length grew lucent as glass.I started to bud like a March twig:An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.From stone to cloud, so I ascended.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.'

...I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature.- The Bell Jar

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

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.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

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 life. And I am horribly limited.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

And I, love, am a pathological liar,

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

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

…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.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

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.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

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

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

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.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

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, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. 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 my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

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.

I am not cruel, only truthful.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

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.

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

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

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

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 tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

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

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

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.

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured...with an informed and intelligent mind.

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.