Sylvia Plath - Feel Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

View all Sylvia Plath Quotes
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

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

Sylvia Plath
It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

Sylvia Plath
I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Sylvia Plath
Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

Sylvia Plath
Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

Sylvia Plath
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

Sylvia Plath
I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing.

Sylvia Plath
I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

Sylvia Plath
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Sylvia Plath
I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

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

Sylvia Plath
* To know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * To know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment…

Sylvia Plath
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. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

Sylvia Plath
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers' sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

Sylvia Plath
I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.

Sylvia Plath
I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

Sylvia Plath
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
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Sylvia Plath
I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

Sylvia Plath
I didn't feel like asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake. I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over — dead white, of course, with no makeup and form the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

Sylvia Plath
I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

Sylvia Plath