Sylvia Plath Quotes

page 5

“I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.”

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

“The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.”

“Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.”

“I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.”

“I collected men with interesting names.”

“I woke to the sound of rain.”

“Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.”

“… we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.”

“I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”

“O love, how did you get here?

--Nick and the Candlestick”

“And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.”

“I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.”

“I hurl my heart to halt his pace.”

“I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the proper sort of man.”

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.”

“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

“The box is only temporary.”

“And I, love, am a pathological liar.”

“It never occurred to me to say no.”

“The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“God, who am I?”

“To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”

“Don't let the wicked city get you down.”

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

“I am I am I am.”

“I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”

“God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?”

“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.”

“A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.”

“Compared with me, a tree is immortal.”

“Ready for a new life”

“The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole---
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.”

“You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…”

“Miracles occur,
If you dare to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's
begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.”

“The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.”

“I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.”

“The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T. B.
Once you were beautiful.”

“I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.

--From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song”

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

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.”

“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”

“Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.”

“A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”

“If only I can find him… the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?”

“It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.”

“A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.”

“You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.”