Sylvia Plath
103 quotes
Biography
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide.
"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. And I am horribly limited."
"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call."
"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed."
"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."
"Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."
"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing."
"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."
"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy."
"let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences"
"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
"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."
"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."
"Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those."
"Is there no way out of the mind?"
"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."
"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
"I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them."
"I desire the things that will destroy me in the end."
"Wear your heart on your skin in this life."
"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."
"I talk to God but the sky is empty."
"I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give."
"I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live."