Sylvia Plath Quotes and Sayings

Sylvia Plath Quotes and Sayings

Sylvia Plath Quotes and Sayings

Sylvia Plath Quotes and Sayings

Excerpt from Wikipedia: Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems.

Sylvia Plath Quotes and Sayings

#1-2 Mad Girl’s Love Song

1. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.

2. I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

#3-6 The Bell Jar, 1963

3. The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

4. There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

5. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

6. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

#7-10 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 2000, Karen V. Kukil, ed. Anchor Press

7. I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

8. With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start.

9. Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.

10. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

#11-13 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 2000, Karen V. Kukil, ed. Anchor Press

11. 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.

12. …remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

13. There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.

#14 Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices

14. What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?

#15 Letters Home

15. The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly managed past.

#16-17 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 18 December 2007

16. I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; i know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. “A passionate, fragmentary girl,” maybe?

17. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

#18 I Thought that I could not be Hurt, Letter Home

18. How frail the human heart must be—a mirrored pool of thought. So deep and tremulous an instrument of glass that it can either sing, or weep.

#19 Letter to Her Mother, 29 January 1955, Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963 [S]

19. But beyond a point, fighting only wears one out and one has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.

#20-21 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

20. And so it seems I must always write you letters here that I can never send. [S]

21. I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between. [S]

#22 Poem: Parliament Hill Fields

22. On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.

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