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Sylvia Plath: 684 quotes249 likes

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 6

“"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."”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 9

“Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.”

1958-04-22
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"Elm"
Ariel (1965)

“Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"Words" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/words.html <br class="br">Ariel (1965)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"Daddy" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/daddy.html <br class="br">Ariel (1965)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

"Mirror" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/mirror.html <br class="br">Crossing the Water (1971)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath The Colossus

"Mushrooms" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/mushrooms.html <br class="br">The Colossus (1960)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

"Blackberrying" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/berry.html <br class="br">Crossing the Water (1971)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 16

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch.7

“There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 20

“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.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"The Moon and the Yew Tree"
Ariel (1965)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"Daddy"
Ariel (1965)

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 6

“The abstract kills, the concrete saves.”

1959-01-07 http://books.google.com/books?id=4V7HOuom_I4C&q=%22The+abstract+kills+the+concrete+saves%22&pg=PA287#v=onepage <br class="br">The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

“What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 5

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7

“They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 11

“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.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"The Applicant" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/applicant.html <br class="br">Ariel (1965)