Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 12

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• The sickness rolled through me in great waves. 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 all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.

  Sylvia Plath

  White, Rising Up, Feet

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.25, Hamilton Books

  5 Copy quote

• Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

  Sylvia Plath

  Lying, Writing, Years

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.32, Anchor

  16 Copy quote

• ..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

  Sylvia Plath

  Spring, Eye, Thinking

  sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

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• 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

  Book, Writing, Angel

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.286, Anchor

  8 Copy quote

• As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

  Sylvia Plath

  Air, Poet, Teach

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  6 Copy quote

• I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

  Sylvia Plath

  Taken, Frost, Mouths

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.92, Anchor

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• God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. 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. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

  Sylvia Plath

  Loneliness, Party, Grief

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.19, Anchor

  9 Copy quote

• If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

  Sylvia Plath

  Song, Cutting, Bird

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.285, Faber & Faber

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• I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.

  Sylvia Plath

  Chance, Alcoholics, Ifs

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.209, Anchor

  6 Copy quote

• Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

  Sylvia Plath

  Years, Oracles, Thirty

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Colossus: and Other Poems”, p.26, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

• I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

  Sylvia Plath

  Christmas, Disappointment, Fire

  Sylvia Plath (2008). “The Bell Jar”, p.65, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

  Sylvia Plath

  Girl, Baby, Writing

  sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

  7 Copy quote

• I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

  Sylvia Plath

  Moon, Thinking, Insane

  sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

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

  Sylvia Plath

  Life, Running, Passion

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.148, Anchor

  14 Copy quote

• At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

  Sylvia Plath

  Twenties, Bones, Dies

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath”, p.50, Faber & Faber

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• How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

  Sylvia Plath

  Hurt, Feelings, Pieces

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.22, Anchor

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

  Sylvia Plath

  Here I Am, Body, Dolls

  Sylvia Plath (2012). “Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy”, p.41, Faber & Faber

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• The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm

  Sylvia Plath

  Honesty, Men, Pseudonyms

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• I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

  Sylvia Plath

  Jobs, Satisfied, I Can

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.81, Anchor

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• I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

  Sylvia Plath

  Teenager, Writing, Long

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

  Sylvia Plath

  Religious, New York, Believe

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.13, Hamilton Books

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• A psychiatrist is the god of our age. But they cost money.

  Sylvia Plath

  Age, Cost, Psychiatrist

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.62, Anchor

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• Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

  Sylvia Plath

  Angel, Long, Waiting

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• And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machinelike dictatorship, be it of industry, state or organization, all their lives long.

  Sylvia Plath

  Organization, Long, Individuality

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.85, Anchor

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• 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

  Space, Years, Two

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.63, Hamilton Books

  8 Copy quote

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