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Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 20

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

I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they

I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they don't ossify.

Discipline, Long, Doe

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

Eight, Boston, Years

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off.

Rose, Zombie, Way

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

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

Sick, May, Panic

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.20, Hamilton Books

…* 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.

Art, Hate, Book

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Writing, Too Late, Letters

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.19, Anchor

On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.

Land, Nurse, Broken

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.94, Anchor

I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

England, Wonderful, Surface

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be.

Knowing, Strange, Timeless

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.221, Anchor

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

Running, Dream, Hate

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

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

Dream, Baby, Wall

The Bell Jar ch. 20 (1963)

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

Children, Thinking, Married

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.45, Hamilton Books

Slowly, slowly, catch the monkey.

Monkeys

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.331, Anchor

Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

Winter, Color, Tree

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.133, Faber & Faber

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.

Inspirational, Ideas, Accomplishment

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

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.

Europe, Gone, Lovers

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

For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.

Self, Doubt, Acres

sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.

Inspirational, Bridges, Glitter

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.188, Anchor

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

Men, White Man, Differences

Sylvia Plath (2008). “The Bell Jar”, p.61, Faber & Faber

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Self, Dry Up, People

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.9, Anchor

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had.

Moving, Weather, White

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.73, Anchor

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Book, Sight, Black

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.19, Hamilton Books

I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.

People, Looks, Should

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.60, Hamilton Books

I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

Beautiful, Thinking, Red

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.204, Faber & Faber

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

Fear, Night, Tunnels

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.199, Faber & Faber

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