Sylvia Plath: Trending quotes (page 11)

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.”

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

“No day is safe from news of you.”

“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.”

“I have stitched life into me like a rare organ”

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

“I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists”

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

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

“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.”

“I used to pray to recover you.”

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“You smile.
No, it is not fatal.”

“Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person”

“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.”

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”

“And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.”

“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.”