Quotes from Sylvia Plath

What did my arms do before they held you?

I felt wise and cynical as all hell.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.

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.

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

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.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

If you love her, I said, you'll love somebody else someday.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. From the poem Years, 16 November 1962

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

I think I made you up inside my head.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

How frail the human heart must be?a mirrored pool of thought.