Sylvia Plath citations

Page 8

“I used to pray to recover you.”

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

“You smile.
No, it is not fatal.”

“Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person”

“I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”

“And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.”

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost… but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

“And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.”

“To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“I collected men with interesting names.”

“I woke to the sound of rain.”

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

“… 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.”

“I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”

“O love, how did you get here?

--Nick and the Candlestick”

“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.”

“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.”

“I hurl my heart to halt his pace.”

“I was my own woman.
The next step was to find the proper sort of man.”

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.”

“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.”

“The box is only temporary.”