Quotes About Plath

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

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

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

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

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. –-from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. --from Kindness, written 1 February 1963

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

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.

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

Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

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.

The great bronze gate began to crack, The sea broke in at every crack, Pellmell, blueblack. --from The Bull of Bendylaw, written 1959

His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.

My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.

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

Write about the cow, Mrs. Spaulding's heavy eyelids, the smell of vanilla flavoring in a brown bottle. That's where the magic mountains begin.

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.