Sylvia Plath: Trending quotes (page 7)

“That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.”

“I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

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

“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”

“There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart -
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.”

“I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.”

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

“And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.”

“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.”

“The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”

“Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.”

“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”

“The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”

“I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”

“I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.”

“All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.”

“I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.”

“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?”