Sylvia Plath citations

Page 2

“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”

“Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”

“I think I am mad sometimes.”

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

“I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.”

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.”

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

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

“Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”

“I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.”

“I wait and ache.”

“They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

“I like people too much or not at all.”

“I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.”

“Opinions are like orgasms… mine matters most and I really don’t care if you have one.”

“The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.”

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.”

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

“I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

“How we need another soul to cling to.”

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”

“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”