Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

Sylvia Plath
If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

Sylvia Plath
A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

Sylvia Plath
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.

Sylvia Plath
I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.

Sylvia Plath
And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.

Sylvia Plath
Antoine St. Exupéry once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupéry; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

Sylvia Plath
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

Sylvia Plath
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.

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

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

Sylvia Plath
It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

Sylvia Plath
The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

Sylvia Plath
I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.

Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

Sylvia Plath
It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

Sylvia Plath
The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.

Sylvia Plath
If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

Sylvia Plath
I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

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

Sylvia Plath
I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Sylvia Plath
They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.

Sylvia Plath
That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. 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
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Sylvia Plath
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.

Sylvia Plath
The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

Sylvia Plath
* To learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * To despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * To yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.

Sylvia Plath
If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

Sylvia Plath
The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

Sylvia Plath