Quotes About Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.

Mother of otherness, Eat me.

A bumptious, outgoing soul, Tillotson would later earn a footnote in literary history as the doctor whose electroshock therapy so traumatized Smith College junior Sylvia Plath that she attempted suicide shortly thereafter.

Despite having two young children to mother, [Sylvia Plath] seemed inept at the basics of life, always needing help.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.1

People who think that Sylvia Plath was a poor, sensitive poet are not getting that she had great amounts of ambition and anger that moved her along, or she wouldn't have been able to fight against that depression to produce such an incredible body of work by the age of thirty.

There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.

Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

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

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ --from Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices, written 1962

Mother of otherness, Eat me. --from Poem for a Birthday - Who, written 1960

You smile. No, it is not fatal. --from The Other, written 2 July 1962

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. --from Poem For A Birthday - The Stones, written 1959

we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. --from Tale of A Tub, written 1956

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. --from Insomniac, written April 1961

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

My mother smiled. I know my baby wasn't like that. I looked at her. Like what? Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital. She paused. I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

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