Sylvia Plath: Trending quotes (page 8)

“How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

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

“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Life , Personality

“I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Love , Thinking , Drawing

“The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.”

Sylvia Plath

1950-07-17 http://books.guardian.co.uk/firstchapters/story/0,6761,222716,00.html
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Love , Pain , Heart

“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.”

Sylvia Plath

Suffering

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”

Sylvia Plath

Flowers , Tree

“I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: CliffsNotes on Plath's The Bell Jar

Time

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Water , Chance

“It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Thinking

“I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Way , Feeling , Girl

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Life , People , Books , Reading

“How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Women , People , Girl

“The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Feeling , Drink , Thinking

“I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7
Context: Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

Change

“How frail the human heart must be —
a mirrored pool of thought.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: "I Thought I Could Not Be Hurt," quoted in the introduction to Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975) as Plath's first poem, written at age 14

Heart

“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Loneliness

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

Lie , Flowers , Idea

“I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.”

Sylvia Plath

Girl