Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 8

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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 / Poet

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.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life than in poetry.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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 / Poet

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a dayspare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence...luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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 / Poet

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

If I have a dry spell ... I wait and live harder, eyes, ears, and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful.

• Sylvia Plath / Poet

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