SPSylvia Plath

234 collected words

Sylvia Plath

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always 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. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

Sylvia Plath / quote

02Undated

if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?

Sylvia Plath / quote

03Undated

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

Sylvia Plath / quote

04Undated

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

Sylvia Plath / quote

05Undated

Neurotic, ha!" I let out a scornful laugh. "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Sylvia Plath / quote

06Undated

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

Sylvia Plath / quote

07Undated

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.

Sylvia Plath / quote

08Undated

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

Sylvia Plath / quote

09Undated

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Sylvia Plath / quote

10Undated

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

Sylvia Plath / quote

11Undated

I can't deceive myself that 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.

Sylvia Plath / quote

12Undated

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

Sylvia Plath / quote

13Undated

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

Sylvia Plath / quote

14Undated

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

Sylvia Plath / quote

15Undated

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 / quote

16Undated

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Sylvia Plath / quote

17Undated

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.

Sylvia Plath / quote

18Undated

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

Sylvia Plath / quote

19Undated

There 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.

Sylvia Plath / quote

20Undated

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

Sylvia Plath / quote

21Undated

They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962

Sylvia Plath / quote

22Undated

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.

Sylvia Plath / quote

23Undated

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

Sylvia Plath / quote

24Undated

We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.A bad dream. I remembered everything.

Sylvia Plath / quote