Sylvia Plath Quotes

Is it the sea you hear in me,Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

~ Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.

~ Sylvia Plath

O love, how did you get here?--Nick and the Candlestick

~ Sylvia Plath

Stars open among the lilies.Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?This is the silence of astounded souls.

~ Sylvia Plath

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

~ Sylvia Plath

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.

~ Sylvia Plath

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

~ Sylvia Plath

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 quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue

~ Sylvia Plath

brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

~ Sylvia Plath

The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.

~ Sylvia Plath

Although, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burning tookPossession of the most obtuse objects now and then --

~ Sylvia Plath

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

~ Sylvia Plath

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

~ Sylvia Plath

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

~ Sylvia Plath

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

~ Sylvia Plath

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

~ Sylvia Plath

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward.

~ Sylvia Plath

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

~ Sylvia Plath

There was a beautiful time...

~ Sylvia Plath

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.

~ Sylvia Plath

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

~ Sylvia Plath

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

~ Sylvia Plath

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.

~ Sylvia Plath

Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

~ Sylvia Plath

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

~ Sylvia Plath

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

~ Sylvia Plath

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars ...

~ Sylvia Plath

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

~ Sylvia Plath

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

~ Sylvia Plath

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after Ihad children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. 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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

~ Sylvia Plath

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

~ Sylvia Plath

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.

~ Sylvia Plath

A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

~ Sylvia Plath