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Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 11

All Quotes Age Art Bones Chaos Character Children College Cooking Darkness Depression Desire Discipline Doubt Earth Emptiness Fate Fear Feelings Feminism Fighting Giving Gold Happiness Hate Heart Hell Home Hurt Illness Inspirational Joy Kissing Life Loneliness Love Love Life Lying Madness Mask Mental Illness Moon Morning Pain Past Rain Reading Rejection Responsibility Running Sad Sadness Sickness Silence Silver Skins Sleep Soul Spring Summer Understanding Vision Waiting Wall Water Winter Writing

You've only got so long to live.

You've only got so long to live.

Long

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.130, Anchor

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Dark, Moon, Doors

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.153, Faber & Faber

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

Wall, Tombstone, College

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.41, Hamilton Books

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.

Christmas, Way, Dull

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.47, Hamilton Books

I said: I must remember this, being small.

Remember, Said

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, Faber & Faber

If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.

Someday, Said, Ifs

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.57, Hamilton Books

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

Believe, Home, Writing

Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Schober Plath (1975). “Letters home: correspondence, 1950-1963”, HarperCollins Publishers

Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?" My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon." I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.

Mother, Writing, Intelligent

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.62, Hamilton Books

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

Curiosity, Regard, Objectives

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.9, Anchor

I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

Writing, Thinking, Knowing

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I'm very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn't at all in my early twenties.

War, Reading, Thinking

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.

Pain, Thinking, Baths

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

Space, Discipline, Feels

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality- She lay in bed with me like a dead body And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I couldn't sleep for a week she was so cold.

Real, Sleep, Two Of Me

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.141, Faber & Faber

Is anyone anywhere happy?

Happiness

Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.200, Faber & Faber

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Eternity, Bores, Wanted

Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.63, Faber & Faber

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

Alive, Stones, Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath (2012). “Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy”, p.51, Faber & Faber

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.

Real, Self, People

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.289, Anchor

So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

Writing, Laughing, Trying

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

Heart, Emotional, Thinking

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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.

Men, Hair, Cake

"Lady Lazarus" l. 82 (1963)

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

Lying, Flower, Sleep

Sylvia Plath (2008). “The Bell Jar”, p.110, Faber & Faber

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.

White, Rising Up, Feet

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.25, Hamilton Books

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Kissing, Sheets, Heavy

Sylvia Plath “Poemas”, Editora Iluminuras Ltda

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.

Eggs, Black, Cadavers

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