Best 581 quotes of Sylvia Plath on MyQuotes

A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape

A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.

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.

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. . . . My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

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.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

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

And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

And I, love, am a pathological liar.

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

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.

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

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.

And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machinelike dictatorship, be it of industry, state or organization, all their lives long.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; 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.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

A psychiatrist is the god of our age. But they cost money.

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

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.

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

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.

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

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

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

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.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse.

Death may whiten in sun or out of it.