Sylvia Plath: Want

Sylvia Plath was American poet, novelist and short story writer. Explore interesting quotes on want.
Sylvia Plath: 684 quotes249 likes

“I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”

Sylvia Plath

Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (December 1955), quoted in Joyce Carol Oates, &quot;Raising Lady Lazarus,&quot; The New York Times (2000-11-05) http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/reviews/001105.05oatest.html <br class="br">The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) <br class="br">Variant: Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”

Sylvia Plath

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962”

Sylvia Plath

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. 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.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.”

Sylvia Plath

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

Sylvia Plath

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Variant: If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 8

“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.”

Sylvia Plath

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

“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7

“Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”

Sylvia Plath

Letter to Aurelia Plath (August 21, 1962)
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950&ndash;1963 (1976)