Sylvia Plath Quotes

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“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”

“There was a beautiful time…”

“My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.”

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962”

“I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.”

“I am myself. That is not enough.”

“Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.”

“How many different deaths I can die?”

“… it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

“I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?”

“I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say "fine”

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”

“I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.”

“I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”

“Not being perfect hurts.”

“If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.”

“I don't know how long I kept at it…
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”

“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.”

“It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.”

“I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.”

“I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”

“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?
Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?”

“If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.”

“…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.”

“I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.”

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.”

“I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.”

“Talking about my fears to others feeds it.”

“Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.”

“You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?”

“I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.”

“I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.”

“I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.”

“The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.”

“Worse even
than your maddening
song, your silence." -”

“Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.”

“Tomorrow is another day toward death.”

“What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.”

“I wondered what I thought I was burying.”

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

“Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.”

“Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.”

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand… hopeless from the start.”

“I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.”

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

“Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”