Quotes About Sylvia Plath

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

They want you to be in a special ward," my mother said. "They don't have that sort of ward at our hospital." "I liked it where I was." My mother's mouth tightened. "You should have behaved better, then." "What?" "You shouldn't have broken that mirror. Then maybe they'd have let you stay." But of course I knew the mirror had nothing to do with it

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

I told Buddy how sorry I was about the TB and promised to write, but when I hung up I didn't feel one bit sorry. I only felt a wonderful relief.

I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.

Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.

a scream was torn from my throat, for I didn't recognise it but heard it soar and quaver in the air like a violently disembodied spirit

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')

May 13 – today I bought a raincoat – no, that was yesterday – yesterday I bought a raincoat with a frivolous pink lining that does good to my eyes because I have never ever had anything pink-colored, and it was much too expensive

Another day of hell. He is on the prowl, all the fiends are come to torment me: and I alone am escaped to tell thee.

Hamish said: He is the biggest seducer in Cambridge.

the ugliness which by man's sense of wishful thinking becomes a beauty touching us all

Then I can write slowly, re-writing each chapter, carefully with a subtle structured style. If I can ever find a subtle structured style.

Only it would help my morale no end to feel it was a good novel.

But you will never take a walk. You will never be alone. And you hate him because he has deprived you of that: - - walks and aloneness. And you hate him because he is a boy.

My enemies are those who care about me most.

and with a tolerant smile that was a superior lie, I walked on.

Cuándo llegará el momento en que el Tiempo se quiebre, Y la eternidad lo engulla, y yo me hunda del todo?

green fronds of a palm tree, while vivid indigo morning glories

What is more wonderful than to be a virgin, clean and sound and young, on such a night? ... (being raped.)

Clouds pass and disperse. / Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? / Is it for such I agitate my heart? — Sylvia Plath, from "Elm," The Collected Poems (HarperPerennial, 1992)

Laughing Lazarus. And I forget the moments of radiance. I must get them down in print. Make them up in print. Be honest.