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Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 8

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

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

Steering

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.3, Hamilton Books

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart.

Broken Heart, Summer, Stars

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.266, Faber & Faber

I do not fear it: I have been there.

Do Not Fear, Has Beens

Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.18, Faber & Faber

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.

Mother, Baby, Stars

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

Live By, Organs

Sylvia Plath (2010). “Winter Trees”, p.32, Faber & Faber

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

Hate, Numbers, Comfort

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.18, Anchor

I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

Who I Am, Water, People

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.76, Anchor

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

Depression, Home, Cutting

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.67, Anchor

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

Beautiful, Sleep, Tree

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.30, Hamilton Books

Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me.

Melting Away, Melting, Feels

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

Suicidal, Sacrifice, Mind

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.198, Faber & Faber

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

Stars, Real, Islands

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.4, Faber & Faber

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Depression, Beautiful, Moving

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.75, Hamilton Books

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

Fall, Writing, Thinking

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

Don't let the wicked city get you down.

Cities, Wicked, Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.22, Hamilton Books

I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.

Littles, Imperfect, Housewife

1956 Letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, 25 Feb. Collected in Aurelia Schober Plath (ed) Letters Home by Sylvia Plath (1949).

I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.

Blood, Hot, Violence

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.237, Anchor

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

Tree, Immortal

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.143, Faber & Faber

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.)

Love, Thinking, Names

sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.

Writing, Sitting, Matter

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.220, Faber & Faber

* 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.

Silly, Writing, Gay

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

Trying, Honest, Being Honest

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.70, Anchor

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

Heart, Spiders, My Heart

Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.119, Faber & Faber

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.

Heart, World, Faces

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

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Two, Neurosis, Hell

The Bell Jar ch. 8 (1963)

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