Sylvia Plath Quotes

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“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”

“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”

“What did my arms do before they held you?”

“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

“Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.”

“I think I made you up inside my head.”

“If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”

“If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.”

“If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.”

“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.”

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”

“There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”

“People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963”

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”

“I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”

“I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”

“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”

“I knew you'd decide to be all right again.”

“Character is fate.”

“Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”

“I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”

“There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.”

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.”

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

“No day is safe from news of you.”

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

“I have stitched life into me like a rare organ”

“I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.”

“I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists”

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”

“Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.”

“I used to pray to recover you.”

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“You smile.
No, it is not fatal.”

“Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person”

“I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”

“And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.”

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost… but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

“And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.”

“To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.”