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Sylvia Plath Quotes (1932-1963)
Writer, Poet, Novelist
About Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 β 11 February 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was the first wife of Ted Hughes.
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βPerfection is terrible, it cannot have children.β
βThe blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.β
There is no stopping it.β
βIf you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.β
βThe bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.β
βThe one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.β
βThey understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.β
βThis is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.β
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.β
βDarling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.β
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.β
βPerhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.β
βAxes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.β
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.β
β
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware.
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
βHow did I know that someday β at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere β the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldnβt descend again?β
βThere 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.β
βYou do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.β
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.β
βNot God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.β
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.β
βDying
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.β
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.β
βI began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.β
βThe 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 a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.β
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.β
βIt was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.β
βSo I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.β
β
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
βThese poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.β
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.β
β
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? β
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults,
That kill, that kill, that kill.
β
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
βFrustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God β or the universal woman-and-man β or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.β
βDon't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen β physical or psychological β wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.β
βIronically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation β he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing β I have Ted, will have children β but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.β
βThese hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.β
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.β
βI'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.β
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.β
βI 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.β
β
You said you would kill it this morning.
Do not kill it. It startles me still,
The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing
Through the uncut grass on the elm's hill.
It is something to own a pheasant,
Or just to be visited at all.
I am not mystical: it isn't
As if I thought it had a spirit.
It is simply in its element.
That gives it a kingliness, a right.
β
βThe 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.β
βInstead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.β
βNow I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.β
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.β
βI 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.β
β
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
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, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
βI happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met. Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.β
βI saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out.β
βWhen they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.β
βI didn't feel like asking him if there were any other ways to have babies. For some reason the most important thing to me was actually seeing the baby come out of you yourself and making sure it was yours. I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake. I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over β dead white, of course, with no makeup and form 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.β
βLater Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn't know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.β
β
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
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.
β"It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?" Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."β
Sylvia Plath Quotes by Topic
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Sylvia Plath on Prayer 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Prayer →Sylvia Plath on Night 2 quotes
βThe moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.β
What Sylvia Plath Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Sylvia Plath shared regarding contemporaries.
Sylvia Plath on Women 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Women →Quotes About Sylvia Plath
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Sylvia Plath from others.
Al Alvarez interviewed on Sylvia Plath
βI was rereading Plath the other day and she is a really an extremely fine, clever poet. In fact, I think Plath has turned out to be a much better poet than Hughes ever was. Of course he won all the prizes, and his name is on the stones in Poetβs Corner and OK, heβs pretty good, but not that good, whereas she gets better and better. ... Her early stuff wasnβt very good, but the poems after she left him β or perhaps itβs more accurate to say that she threw him out β were extraordinary. Itβs funny when I reflect on back then, there were these two young poets I really liked, but at some point in those last few years, something shifted for her. What had happened was that Ted had gone on doing what he knew how to do, in a kind of slightly automatic way, whereas Sylvia had that one extraordinary year where she wrote non-stop. At that point she shot ahead.β
Elizabeth Hardwick on Sylvia Plath
βLong after I had been reading her work I came across the recording of some of her poems she made in England not long before she died. I have never before learned anything from a poetry reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plathβs reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poemsβ"Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "The Applicant," "Fever 103Β°"βwere "beautifully" read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!"β
Shirley Geok-lin Lim on Sylvia Plath
βI believe that the consciousness from which creativity comes is this intensity of focus that is the result of practice. Sylvia Plath wrote exercise poems. Writing poetry is itself a form of exercise, a discipline as much as it is a calling and an art. And a discipline always asks for exercise.β
Janet Malcolm on Sylvia Plath
βAnd yet when we think of Plath's death at dawn in an indifferent London it is homely Massachusetts that somehow comes back into view. The idea of death far away from home has a special pathos; embedded in it is the fantasy that the foreign place contributed to the death, perhaps was even the cause of it. Foreignness is threatening, dangerous: if only he or she had stayed home and not drunk that water, not taken that ancient bus over the pass, never ventured into that evil cafΓ©.β
Joni mitchell on Sylvia Plath
βThe confessional poets like [Sylvia] Plath, whom I read later when they started calling me confessional, most of their stuff seemed contrived to me and not as greatly honest as it was touted to be.β
About Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 β 11 February 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was the first wife of Ted Hughes.