Sylvia plath quotes

* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

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

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

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

I woke to the sound of rain.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

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

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

Opinions are like orgasms...mine matters most and I really don't care if you have one.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

I think I made you up inside my head.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

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.

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

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

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

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 life. And I am horribly limited.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

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

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.

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!

I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can't understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I'm fascinated by this mastery of the practical.

O love, how did you get here?

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Everything in life is writable.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

Your room is not your prison. You are.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

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.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

I am myself. That is not enough.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

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.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

How we need another soul to cling to.

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

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

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

Is there no way out of the mind?

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

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

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

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.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

Character is fate.

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

I am not cruel, only truthful.

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.

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I am what I feel and think and do.

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.

We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

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.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart.

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 every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.

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

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

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 loosing 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.