Sylvia Plath Quotes

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
― Sylvia Plath , The Collected Poems

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“My world falls apart, crumbles, “The centre cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. 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. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“How we need that security. 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

--from "Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", written 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“...it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing - singing, laughing, learning.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.”
― Ted Hughes

“I don't know how long I kept at it...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted"

- Sylvia Plath's epitaph (from Wu Cheng'en's novel Journey to the West aka. Monkey, translated by Arthur Waley)”
― Wu Cheng'en

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Even amongst fierce flames/ The golden lotus can be planted.”
― Bhagavid-Gita

“[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.”
― Anne Carson

“My mind is killing me”
— The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...

reminded one more of great Atlantic rollers than human formations. Clouds of cavalry, avalanches of field-guns and—at that time a novelty—squadrons of motor-cars (private and military) completed the array. For five hours the immense defilade continued. Yet this was only a twentieth of the armed strength of the regular German Army before mobilization.

Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!”
― Avijeet Das

“Science has robbed the sun and moon of magic, leaving a spotted ball of gasses and a dead crater-pocked world in place of gold god and silver queen: a poor trade. Worse, men and women no longer live by intuition, but by ideas. The chittering dictums of the head and the will block out the spontaneous voices of the blood and the impulse. . . . Deprived of the rhythm of savage song, the meaning of the animal yell, we exist for the mechanical screak of steel on steel . . . .
We must get back “in touch.”
― Sylvia Plath

“My Mother

They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practicing it. She saves them
The trouble of their own;
They can die through her
Without ever making
The decision. My buried mother
Is up-dug for repeat performances.

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.

The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother’s death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless – a souvenir.
Maybe they’ll buy the video.

Watching someone on TV
Means all they have to do
Is press ‘pause’
If they want to boil a kettle,
While my mother holds her breath on screen
To finish dying after tea.
The filmmakers have collected
The body parts,
They want me to see.
They require dressings to cover the joins
And disguise the prosthetics
In their remake of my mother;
They want to use her poetry
As stitching and sutures
To give it credibility.
They think I should love it –
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother’s words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.”
― Frieda Hughes, The Book of Mirrors

“When [Sylvia] Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England reached a staggering 10 per 100,000. Driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977 when the Natural Gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for young woman was half that.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Talking To Strangers: What We Don't Know About Strangers

“She was, [Wilfrid Riley] recalled, "a very clever person, but you couldn't be at ease with her some way. She wasn't with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you . . . You couldn't sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people." It wasn't pride, he thought, that made her this way. "Shyness came into it. She couldn't lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don't think she intended to be.”
― Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath