Quotes from Sylvia Plath

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? From Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, 1962

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

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.

Please don't expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand. (This quote is probably wrongly attributed to Sylvia Plath)

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

Is anyone anywhere happy?

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

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.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

I am too pure for you or anyone. From the poem Fever 103°, 20 October 1962

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.

I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.