Quotes from Sylvia Plath

O teach me how I should forget to think

But talking about it hypothetically is grim:

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 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?

What am I doing with a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood, Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers? — Sylvia Plath, from Leaving Early," Crossing the Water . (Harper Perennial May 9, 1980) Originally published 1971.

It will be dark, And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

I love you because you are me … my writing, my desire to be many lives. I will be a little god in my small way.

Clouds pass and disperse. / Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? / Is it for such I agitate my heart? — Sylvia Plath, from "Elm," The Collected Poems (HarperPerennial, 1992)

DEATH IS ONE OF THE MOST MOVING & TROUBLING EXPERIENCES OF LIFE: DEATH-IN-LIFE IS ONE OF THE MOST TERRIBLE STATES OF EXISTENCE: NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs: BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don't be indifferent, don't be NOTHING . . . MANY POETS, MANY READERS live by poetry as people have lived by religion: BOTH ARE RITUALS, PATTERNS, [that give] special meaning to the most profound experiences of human life.

And then there are the many many times I have given myself to that fury and that death which is loving you, and I am, to my own knifing hurt, more faithful than is kind to my peace and my wholeness. I live in two worlds and as long as we are apart, I always shall.

Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

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.

In the corner of my garden There is a favorite spot, Which sun and rain tend faithfully And which I planted not. Here is the haven of wild flowers, The kingdom of birds and bees; Here in the silvery moonlight Sprites dance 'neath singing trees.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. [...] 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

must become (since I could not be a nun) a consecrated single woman. Now if I were inclined to a career as a lawyer or journalist that would be all right.

That being free. What would the dark Do without fevers to eat? What would the light Do without eyes to knife, what would he Do, do, do without me.

On a striped mattress in one room An old man is vanishing.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know. There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness. I am so vulnerable suddenly. I am a wound walking out of hospital. I am a wound they are letting go. I leave my health behind. I leave someone Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go. (Three Women)

Hadn't my own mother told me that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon—my father had been married before, so he needed a divorce—my father said to her, 'Whew, that's a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves

am inclined to babies and bed and brilliant friends and a magnificent stimulating home where geniuses drink gin in the kitchen after a delectable dinner and read their own novels and tell about why the stock market is the way it will be

well, anyhow, this is what I was meant to make for a man, and to give him this colossal reservoir of faith and love for him to swim in daily

i took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart

I give and give; my whole life will be a saying of poems and a loving of people and giving of my best fiber to them.

They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture.