Sylvia Plath Quotes

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.

~ Sylvia Plath

Even amongst fierce flames/ The golden lotus can be planted.

~ Bhagavid-Gita

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ 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

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

~ Anne Carson

We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!

~ Avijeet Das

Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Sylvia was an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly. She is at once her own documentarian and the reflexive voice that says she is unworthy of documentation. She sends her image into the world to be seen, discussed, and devoured, proclaiming that the ordinariness or ugliness of her existence does not remove her right to have it.

~ Alana Massey

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

~ Sylvia Plath

My mind is killing me”— The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind

~ Charlotte Eriksson

So what do you think?’ He asked, holding up the book.‘I think Salinger is a closet paedophile,’ I replied placidly and was surprised and comforted by this minuscule, acidic, bitter Sylvia Plath like mocking, sniping tone that had crept into my voice. ‘The main character Seymour is a fully grown man and a pervert who befriends young girls with his storytelling and swimming, just to get close enough to groom them in preparation for the inevitable sexual assault he lusts after. You might have noticed for example in A Perfect Day For Bananafish he grabs the young girls-’‘Sybil.’‘He grabs Sybil’s ankles while lying on the beach and again when he pushes her in the water,’ I continued. ‘He goes too far when he kisses the bottom of her foot which makes even a four-year-old yell out in fear, knowing a line had been crossed. Frustrated Seymour walks away and goes back to his hotel where he kills himself in shame.

~ J.d. Gallagher

if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?

~ Sylvia Plath

The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for sins that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.

~ Sady Doyle

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

~ Sylvia Plath

I wished I hadn’t majored in women filling their pockets with stones and sticking their heads into ovens. Maybe tomorrow the pinhole would widen and I would want to be a marine biologist.

~ Kat Clark

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

~ Sylvia Plath

There is no better way to know us Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.

~ Ted Hughes

[Sylvia Plath] was now far along a peculiarly solitary road on which not many would risk following her. So it was important for her to know that her messages were coming back clear and strong. Yet not even her determinedly bright self-reliance could disguise the loneliness that came from her almost palpably, like a heat haze. She asked for neither sympathy nor help but, like bereaved widow at a wake, she simply wanted company in her mourning.

~ Al Álvarez

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into.

~ Sylvia Plath

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

~ Sylvia Plath

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

~ Sylvia Plath

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

~ Sylvia Plath

The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon.

~ Al Álvarez

We are not what we might be, what we are / Outlaws all extrapolation / Beyond the interval of now and here: / White whales are gone with the white ocean.

~ Sylvia Plath

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It’s tradition and form—fear of the unknown—driving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show….

~ Chila Woychik

It is perhaps fortunate that Sylvia was oblivious to the commotion behind the scenes. Apparently, Henry O. Teltscher had written a letter to Betsy Talbot Blackwell, warning her that one of her guest editors was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

~ Elizabeth Winder

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more

~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am already.

~ Arlaina Tibensky

Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

~ Janet Malcolm