Ariel Quotes

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Is it the sea you hear in me?
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

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

--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.

--from "Cut", written 24 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.

--from "Lesbos", written 18 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I used to pray to recover you.

--from "Daddy", written 12 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart -
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

--from "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“You smile.
No, it is not fatal.

--from "The Other", written 2 July 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet.

--from "Lesbos", written 18 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Ash, ash —-
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen.
A far sea moves in my ear.

--from "Morning Song", written 19 February 1961”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I am only thirty
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“And we, too, had a relationship—
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“All the gods know is destinations.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“This is a case without a body.
The body does not come into it at all.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

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

“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition