Quotes About Author

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. --from Cut, written 24 October 1962

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say that I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses. --from Three Women, written March 1962

Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.

The words in his book wormed off the pages. Everything glittered like blank paper.

I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.

The day I went into physics class is was death.

But perhaps the most overlooked feature of her life was that she was human, and therefore fallible.

I am not a smile. These children are after something,with hooks and cries, And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.

A heavy naughtiness pricked through my veins, irritating and attractive as the hurt of a loose tooth.

Inertia oozed like molasses through Elaine's limbs.

Five balls! Five bright brass balls! To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.

Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.

I had never been to Chicago, but I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.

For contemporary readers who look back on the fifties as simply being cool, it may be difficult to see how daring Plath really was. In the clutches of postwar conformity and rampant conservatism

But then, she was practical and a sociology major.

The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a foetus in a bottle.

What's the matter with me?' 'Poisoned,' she said briefly. 'Poisoned, the whole lot of you. I never seen anythin' like it. Sick here, sick there, whatever have you young ladies been stuffin' yourselves with?

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?" "No, what?" I said. "A piece of dust.

There is no terminus, only suitcases / Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit / Bold and shiny, with pockets of wishes. (from 'Totem')

his ego is like an unbroken puppy: scampering about spurting effusively over everything, especially if Everything is admiring.