Sylvia Plath Quotes

• 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.
• What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?
• So many of us! So many of us! We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible, Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves. Our kind multiplies: We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.
• The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.
• There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
• I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.
• 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.
• If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
• What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
• 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.
• 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.
• Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.
• I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
• So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.
• The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
• I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
• If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
• 'It's a tango.' Marco maneuvered me out aomg the dancers. 'I love tangoes.' '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.'
• I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chockful of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.
• 'Does she know you love her?' 'Of course.' I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. 'If you love her,' I said, 'you'll love somebody else someday.'
• They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.
• 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 defenceless 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.
• Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
• 'I hate her,' I said, and waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much and said, 'I suppose you do.'
• The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
• How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?
• To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
• I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
• There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.
• Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it's a poultice. You have an eye, it's an image. My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
• Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.
• Herr God, Herr Lucifer, Beware. Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
• I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
• I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids hiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults, That kill, that kill, that kill.
• This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
• The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
• You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
• There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
• Darling, all night I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.
• Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
• The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.
• The woman is perfected Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. 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.
• Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes travelling Off from the centre like horses.
• These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt. I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
• These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. They grew their toes and fingers well enough, Their little foreheads bulged with concentration. If they missed out on walking about like people It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.
• Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
• 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.
• You said you would kill it this morning. Do not kill it. It startles me still, The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing Through 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.
• 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.
• I talk to God but the sky is empty.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
• 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.
• 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.
• You are crucified by your own limitations. Your blind choices cannot be changed, they are now irrevocable. You have had chances; you have not taken them. You are wallowing in original sin; your limitations. You cannot even decide to take a walk in the country: you are not sure whether it is an escape or a refreshing cure from cooping yourself in your room all day.
• Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
• I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
• And who am I, God-that-I-don't-believe-in?
• Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
• How we need another soul to cling to.
• I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek will get ignored and trampled.
• I don't care any more about the handsome wealthy boys who come gingerly into the living room to take out the girl they thought would look nice in an evening cocktail dress...I said I wanted to go out with them to meet new people. I ask you, what logic is there in that? What guy you would like, would see the depths in a girl outwardly like all the other physical american queenies? So why go places with guys you can't talk to? You'll never meet a soul that way---not the sort you want to meet. Better to stay in your garret reading than to go from one party to another. Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long. You've got to be able to talk. That's tough. But spend your nights learning, so you'll have something to say. Something the 'attractive intelligent man' will want to listen to.
• If god made man perfect, where did sickness, disease and death come from?
• If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.
• If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
• Is anyone anywhere happy?
• I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.
• Love is an illusion, but I would be willingly fall for it if I could believe in it.
• No man can ever grasp the whole impersonal neutrality of a universe.
• Reality is relative, depending on what lens you look through.
• So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.
• So what is reality? ...It could be the basic truth, the fact of matter, impersonal, neutral. Or it could be, for each individual, what that individual chooses to make of his corner of the world.
• Still whole, I interest nobody.
• To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egotism.
• To learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there's butter on it.
• Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
• Women in numbers have always disturbed me.

sylvia plath