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Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 12

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

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

Lying, Writing, Years

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.32, Anchor

..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Spring, Eye, Thinking

sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

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.

Book, Writing, Angel

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.286, Anchor

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

Taken, Frost, Mouths

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.92, Anchor

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. 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. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

Loneliness, Party, Grief

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.19, Anchor

As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

Air, Poet, Teach

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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

Song, Cutting, Bird

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.285, Faber & Faber

I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.

Chance, Alcoholics, Ifs

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.209, Anchor

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.

Years, Oracles, Thirty

Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Colossus: and Other Poems”, p.26, Vintage

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

Christmas, Disappointment, Fire

Sylvia Plath (2008). “The Bell Jar”, p.65, Faber & Faber

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?

Girl, Baby, Writing

sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

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

Life, Running, Passion

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.148, Anchor

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Moon, Thinking, Insane

sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

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

Twenties, Bones, Dies

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath”, p.50, Faber & Faber

I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.

Here I Am, Body, Dolls

Sylvia Plath (2012). “Sylvia Plath Poems Chosen by Carol Ann Duffy”, p.41, Faber & Faber

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm

Honesty, Men, Pseudonyms

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

Jobs, Satisfied, I Can

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.81, Anchor

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Teenager, Writing, Long

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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.

Religious, New York, Believe

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.13, Hamilton Books

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

Age, Cost, Psychiatrist

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.62, Anchor

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.

Organization, Long, Individuality

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.85, Anchor

Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.

Angel, Long, Waiting

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

Space, Years, Two

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.63, Hamilton Books

If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.

Men, Blue, Looks

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.8, Hamilton Books

How many different deaths I can die?

Different, Dies, I Can

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.66, Anchor

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