Sylvia Plath Quotes

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“What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

“Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.”

“I'm never going to get married."
"You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind."
"No. My mind's made up.”

“If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.”

“I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.”

“What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?”

“Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?”

“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

“But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”

“The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”

“I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”

“To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.”

“I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”

“I am made, crudely, for success.”

“I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”

“Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

“The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”

“Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.”

“God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.”

“Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.”

“I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”

“The day I went into physics class it was death.”

“I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.”

“God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.”

“The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.”

“I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.”

“I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye's darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard s study.”

“The frost makes a flower,
the dew makes a star.”

“I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”

“Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God”

“It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.”

“What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.”

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.”

“I self-paralyze myself & wonder what I've got in my head.”

“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted”

“A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”

“I hated to serve men in any way.”

“For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.”

“I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.”

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

“It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?”

“You said you would kill it this morning.
Do not kill it. It startles me still,
The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing

Through the uncut grass on the elm's hill.
It is something to own a pheasant,
Or just to be visited at all.

I am not mystical: it isn't
As if I thought it had a spirit.
It is simply in its element.

That gives it a kingliness, a right.”

“Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.”

“These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.”

“The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.”

“Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”