Sylvia Plath

Quotes

• “Plath is an indefatigable graphomaniac who could write as fervently of colds, fevers, nausea, cramps and nosepicking as ...”
• “And yet when we think of Plath's death at dawn in an indifferent London it is homely Massachusetts that somehow comes ba...”
• “Anger has always played a role in poetry...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies ...”
• “Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,Searching my reaches for what she really is.Then she turns to those liars, the ca...”
• “The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were m...”
• “Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black...”
• “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...”
• “You said you would kill it this morning.Do not kill it. It startles me still,The jut of that odd, dark head, pacingThrou...”
• “These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings meTo th...”
• “I'm a riddle in nine syllables,An elephant, a ponderous house,A melon strolling on two tendrils.O red fruit, ivory, fine...”
• “I believe that the consciousness from which creativity comes is this intensity of focus that is the result of practice. ...”
• “Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God - or the universal woman-and-man - or anything much. I a...”
• “Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen - physical or psychological - wan...”
• “With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is g...”
• “Like piranhas devouring their prey, Plath's thoughts rush, churn, thresh -- there is sheer demonic energy here, exhausti...”
• “These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.They grew their toes and fingers well enough,Their little foreheads bulged...”
• “Diary entry from 1951 in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (New York: Anchor Books) as cited by Cordeli...”
• “I am incapable of more knowledge.What is this, this faceSo murderous in its strangle of branches? -Its snaky acids hiss....”
• “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying...”
• “So many of us!So many of us!We are shelves, we areTables, we are meek,We are edible,Nudgers and shoversIn spite of ourse...”
• “I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full...”
• “I am inhabited by a cry.Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.I am terrified by this dark t...”
• “So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and aft...”
• “The confessional poets like [Sylvia] Plath, whom I read later when they started calling me confessional, most of their s...”
• “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like ...”
• “The recordings in London (by the BBC) date from 1962. "I have done it again!", is the opening line of Plath's "Lady Laza...”
• “There's a stake in your fat black heartAnd the villagers never liked you.They are dancing and stamping on you.They alway...”
• “It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, ...”
• “I hate her," I said, and waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her...”
• “Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck an...”
• “Chava Rosenfarb Zweig, the German Language, and Suicide in Confessions of a Yiddish Writer and Other Essays, translated ...”
• “There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you ...”
• “DyingIs 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...”
• “Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteB...”
• “I Thought I Could Not Be Hurt," quoted in the introduction to Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 (1975) as Plath's f...”
• “Does she know you love her?" "Of course." I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. "If you love her," I said, "you'll...”
• “You do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely...”
• “If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotio...”
• “Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (December 1955), quoted in Joyce Carol Oates, "Raising Lady Lazarus," The New York Ti...”
• “Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes talk about their relationship" The Guardian (15 April 2020) links to a British Library copy ...”
• “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New Yo...”
• “I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin.”
• “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”
• “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”
• “There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”
• “Shirley Geok-lin Lim in Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft by Bill Moyers (1999)”
• “AxesAfter whose stroke the wood rings,And the echoes!Echoes travellingOff from the centre like horses.”
• “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
• “They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.”
• “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”