Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 8

Quotes about:

• My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.

  Sylvia Plath

  Habit, Worst, Destructive

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.430, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

• My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
  My tears like vinegar,
  Or the bitter blinking yellow
  Of an acetic star.
  Tonight the caustic wind, love,
  Gossips late and soon,
  And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
  The sour lemon moon.
  While like an early summer plum,
  Puny, green, and tart,
  Droops upon its wizened stem
  My lean, unripened heart.

  Sylvia Plath

  Broken Heart, Summer, Stars

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.266, Faber & Faber

  13 Copy quote

• I do not fear it: I have been there.

  Sylvia Plath

  Do Not Fear, Has Beens

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.18, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

• Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

  Sylvia Plath

  Steering

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.3, Hamilton Books

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Beautiful, Sleep, Tree

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.30, Hamilton Books

  22 Copy quote

• I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
  With tigery stripes, and a face on it
  Round as the moon, to stare up.
  I want to be looking at them when they come
  Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
  I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
  Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
  I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
  They will wonder if I was important.

  Sylvia Plath

  Mother, Baby, Stars

  7 Copy quote

• Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me.

  Sylvia Plath

  Melting Away, Melting, Feels

  10 Copy quote

• Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Stars, Writing

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• ...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

  Sylvia Plath

  Stars, Real, Islands

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.4, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

  Sylvia Plath

  Who I Am, Water, People

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.76, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

• You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Home, Cutting

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.67, Anchor

  6 Copy quote

• Don't let the wicked city get you down.

  Sylvia Plath

  Cities, Wicked, Bell Jar

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.22, Hamilton Books

  13 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Heart, Sleep, Dark

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel: The Restored Edition”, p.35, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

• The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

  Sylvia Plath

  Suicidal, Sacrifice, Mind

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.198, Faber & Faber

  5 Copy quote

• I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

  Sylvia Plath

  Fall, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  13 Copy quote

• I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Beautiful, Moving

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.75, Hamilton Books

  8 Copy quote

• I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.

  Sylvia Plath

  Blood, Hot, Violence

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.237, Anchor

  9 Copy quote

• Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

  Sylvia Plath

  Tree, Immortal

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.143, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

• I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.

  Sylvia Plath

  Littles, Imperfect, Housewife

  1956 Letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, 25 Feb. Collected in Aurelia Schober Plath (ed) Letters Home by Sylvia Plath (1949).

  8 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.)

  Sylvia Plath

  Love, Thinking, Names

  sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

  7 Copy quote

• The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Sitting, Matter

  Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.220, Faber & Faber

  9 Copy quote

• * to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.

  Sylvia Plath

  Silly, Writing, Gay

  6 Copy quote

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

  Sylvia Plath

  Trying, Honest, Being Honest

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.70, Anchor

  16 Copy quote

• It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.

  Sylvia Plath

  Heart, World, Faces

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

  15 Copy quote

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

  Sylvia Plath

  Two, Neurosis, Hell

  The Bell Jar ch. 8 (1963)

  90 Copy quote

Page 8 of 25

First

← Prev

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin