Quotes About Sylvia Plath

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction.

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

O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. From the poem Cut, 24 October 1962

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.

Do I love laziness more than I love the feeling of accomplishing work? I take the path of least resistance and curl up with a book.

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

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?' 'No, what?' I would say. 'A piece of dust.' Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

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.

You defy questions; You defy other godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom's border, Exiled to no good.

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.

The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence

This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.

Between Sylvia and me there existed as between my own mother and me - a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy (words from Aurelia Plath from the Introduction)

I'm very interested in everything. The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee's desk, like so many wooden nickels.

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

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems any more. 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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

Inertia oozed like molasses through Elaine's limbs.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the soundproof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.