Sylvia Plath Quotes - Page 20

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• But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

  Sylvia Plath

  Thinking, Two, Special

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.34, Anchor

  12 Copy quote

• The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

  Sylvia Plath

  Broken Heart, Moon, Thinking

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.45, Faber & Faber

  5 Copy quote

• A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Yesterday, Vision

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.314, Anchor

  8 Copy quote

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

  Sylvia Plath

  People, Littles, Rooms

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.22, Anchor

  5 Copy quote

• I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

  Sylvia Plath

  Children, Makeup, Hair

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.36, Hamilton Books

  5 Copy quote

• I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

  Sylvia Plath

  Mother, Jobs, College

  12 Copy quote

• Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Stars, Wall

  Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

  7 Copy quote

• You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Space, Barns

  Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel: The Restored Edition”, p.55, Faber & Faber

  7 Copy quote

• This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

  Sylvia Plath

  Light, Blue, Tree

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.153, Faber & Faber

  10 Copy quote

• The tulips are too red...they hurt me.

  Sylvia Plath

  Hurt, Red, Hurt Me

  6 Copy quote

• I am made, crudely, for success.

  Sylvia Plath

  Bell Jar, Made

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.220, Anchor

  7 Copy quote

• Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

  Sylvia Plath

  New York, Heart, Dark

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.59, Hamilton Books

  6 Copy quote

• The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

  Sylvia Plath

  Play, People, Mad

  Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.79, Hamilton Books

  6 Copy quote

• I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

  Sylvia Plath

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  6 Copy quote

• The moon has nothing to be sad about,
  Staring from her hood of bone.
  She is used to this sort of thing.
  Her blacks crackle and drag.

  Sylvia Plath

  Moon, Darkness, Bones

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.224, Faber & Faber

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Discipline, Long, Doe

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Eight, Boston, Years

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  7 Copy quote

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

  Sylvia Plath

  Rose, Zombie, Way

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

  5 Copy quote

• I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

  Sylvia Plath

  Baby, Fighting, People

  "The Bell Jar".

  4 Copy quote

• …* 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Art, Hate, Book

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Too Late, Letters

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Land, Nurse, Broken

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

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  England, Wonderful, Surface

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Beautiful, Thinking, Red

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

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Plath

  Knowing, Strange, Timeless

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

  9 Copy quote

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