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Sylvia Plath Quotes
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Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Boston, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962.

Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy . She committed suicide in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems.

✵ 27. October 1932 – 11. February 1963  •  Other names سیلویا پلات
Sylvia Plath photo
Sylvia Plath: 342 quotes249 likes

Sylvia Plath Quotes

“If you pluck out my heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: Selected Poems

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

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

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

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

Sylvia Plath Ariel

&quot;Kindness&quot; http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/kindness.html <br class="br">Source: Ariel (1965)

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

Sylvia Plath book The Colossus and Other Poems

Source: The Colossus and Other Poems

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 9

“I collected men with interesting names.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I woke to the sound of rain.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

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

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

Source: Crossing the Water

“… 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.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“O love, how did you get here?

--Nick and the Candlestick”

Sylvia Plath

Source: Plath: Poems

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

“I hurl my heart to halt his pace.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“The box is only temporary.”

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It never occurred to me to say no.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

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

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 18

“God, who am I?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

“I am I am I am.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

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

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“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?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Compared with me, a tree is immortal.”

Sylvia Plath

“Ready for a new life”

Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

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

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

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

Sylvia Plath

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“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”

Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“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?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

1950-07-06
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath