Quotes About Sylvia

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

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.

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.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. Sylvia Plath, Ariel; from 'The Moon and the Yew Tree

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

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

Each of these magic seven weeks: writing: not the novel yet, until I'm warmed up.

smiling that smile which puts a benevolent lacquer on the shuddering fear of strangers' gazes

memory throws a kind of halo around him.

I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.