Sylvia Plath: Doing

Sylvia Plath was American poet, novelist and short story writer. Explore interesting quotes on doing.

Sylvia Plath: 684 quotes249 likes

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"Lady Lazarus" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/lady.html <br class="br">Source: Ariel (1965)

“Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.”

“I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

“I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.”

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I started adding up all the things I couldn't do.”

“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”

Source: The Collected Poems

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

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”

1950 entry, quoted in Gayle Wurst, Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1999), p. 158
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

"Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/3women.html (1962), a radio play published in 1968 <br class="br">Variant: What did my fingers do before they held him?<br>What did my heart do, with its love? <br class="br">Source: The Collected Poems

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

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Variant: The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.
Source: The Bell Jar

“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 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

“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

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