Sylvia Plath Quotes

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...

Yet I liked him too much… way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did.

Your shelled bed I remember.Father, this thick air is murderous.I would breathe water.

Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

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

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk.   It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, its a poultice. You have an eye, its an image. My boy...

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink intoordinariness, 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...

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and...

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.

Backward we traveled to reclaim the dayBefore we fell, like Icarus, undone;All we find are altars in decayAnd profane words scrawled black across the sun.--From the poem Doom of the Exiles, written 16...

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'No, what?' I would say.A piece of dust.'Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you...

For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing a...

His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn't want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction towa...

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself...

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedto lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free.