Sylvia Plath: Trending quotes (page 15)

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

“But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”

“The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”

“I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”

“To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.”

“I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”

“I am made, crudely, for success.”

“I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”

“Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

“The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”

“Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.”

“God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.”

“Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.”

“I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”

“The day I went into physics class it was death.”

“I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.”

“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.”

“The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.”