Sylvia Plath Quotes

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“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.”

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”

“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.”

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962”

“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”

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

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

“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.”

“Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”

“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.”

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

“I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.”

“Is it the sea you hear in me?
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.”

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

“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.”

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

“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.”

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

“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.”

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

“Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.”

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

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

“Mother of otherness,
Eat me.”

“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.”

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

“I’ll never speak to God again.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

“The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”

“I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.”