Aimie McAllester > Aimie's Quotes

“There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid & golden with peace?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots "I think, therefore I am," whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait. What avail are good looks? To grab temporary security? What avail are brains? Merely to say "I have seen; I have comprehended?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in demand from moment to moment...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

“I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies—for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I knew you’d decide to be all right again.” STARLET”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenceless 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I am a part of all that I have met.” To you, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something. There is nothing but that it will suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Through me transmuted.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I needed experience. How Could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?”
― Sylvia Plath

“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a tombstone.”
― Sylvia Plath

“Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Fixed stars govern a life”
― Sylvia Plath

“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits best?”
― Sylvia Plath

“The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt”
― Sylvia Plath

“Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted to see as much as I could.
I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.
I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me - draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?"

My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.

It's almost three in the afternoon."

I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.

--from "Kindness", written 1 February 1963”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton