Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

Sylvia Plath
I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.

Sylvia Plath
I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.

Sylvia Plath
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

Sylvia Plath
God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good.

Sylvia Plath
Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting.

Sylvia Plath
There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

Sylvia Plath
"It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?" Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."

Sylvia Plath
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Sylvia Plath
I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

Sylvia Plath
The wonderful thing about these stories is that I can do them by perspiration, not inspiration — so I can work on them while Frieda is playing in the room.

Sylvia Plath
It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

Sylvia Plath
There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart - It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

Sylvia Plath
But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

Sylvia Plath
I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much.

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

Sylvia Plath
Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

Sylvia Plath
Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

Sylvia Plath
Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

Sylvia Plath
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Sylvia Plath
The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

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

Sylvia Plath
If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

Sylvia Plath
I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

Sylvia Plath
Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

Sylvia Plath
I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

Sylvia Plath
I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead — after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.

Sylvia Plath
A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

Sylvia Plath
If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

Sylvia Plath
The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.

Sylvia Plath