Sylvia Plath Quotes

DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died before I had time―Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toeBig as a Frisco sealAnd a head in the freakish AtlanticWhen it pours bean green over blueIn the waters of beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du.In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars.But the name of the town is common.My Polack friendSays there are a dozen or two.So I never could tell where youPut your foot, your root,I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw.It stuck in a barb wire snare.Ich, ich, ich, ich,I could hardly speak.I thought every German was you.And the language obsceneAn engine, an engineChuffing me off like a Jew.A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.I began to talk like a Jew.I think I may well be a Jew.The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of ViennaAre not very pure or true.With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luckAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew.I have always been scared of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You―Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you.You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut no less a devil for that, no notAnd less the black man whoBit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do.So daddy, I’m finally through.The black telephone’s off at the root,The voices just can’t worm through.If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two―The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year,Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now.There’s a stake in your fat black heartAnd the villagers never like you.They are dancing and stamping on you.They always knew it was you.Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sylvia Plath
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
Sylvia Plath
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
Sylvia Plath
It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
Sylvia Plath
Wind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.
Sylvia Plath
Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.
Sylvia Plath
Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?
Sylvia Plath
I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
Sylvia Plath
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
Sylvia Plath
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
Sylvia Plath
I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more
Sylvia Plath
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
Sylvia Plath
Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.
Sylvia Plath
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
Sylvia Plath
All the gods know is destinations.
Sylvia Plath
I am your opus.
Sylvia Plath
I woke to the sound of rain.
Sylvia Plath
I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
Sylvia Plath
I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.
Sylvia Plath
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
Sylvia Plath
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
Sylvia Plath
She looked terrible, but very wise.
Sylvia Plath
I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.
Sylvia Plath
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.
Sylvia Plath
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Sylvia Plath
If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
Sylvia Plath
This is a case without a body.The body does not come into it at all.
Sylvia Plath
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
Sylvia Plath
What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
Sylvia Plath
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
Sylvia Plath
LoreleiIt is no night to drown in:A full moon, river lapsingBlack beneath bland mirror-sheen,The blue water-mists droppingScrim after scrim like fishnetsThough fishermen are sleeping,The massive castle turretsDoubling themselves in a glassAll stillness. Yet these shapes floatUp toward me, troubling the faceOf quiet. From the nadirThey rise, their limbs ponderousWith richness, hair heavierThan sculptured marble. They singOf a world more full and clearThan can be. Sisters, your songBears a burden too weightyFor the whorled ear's listeningHere, in a well-steered country,Under a balanced ruler.Deranging by harmonyBeyond the mundane order,Your voices lay siege. You lodgeOn the pitched reefs of nightmare,Promising sure harborage;By day, descant from bordersOf hebetude, from the ledgeAlso of high windows. WorseEven than your maddeningSong, your silence. At the sourceOf your ice-hearted calling-Drunkenness of the great depths.O river, I see driftingDeep in your flux of silverThose great goddesses of peace.Stone, stone, ferry me down there.
Sylvia Plath
EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof, while blasé princesses indicttilts at terror as downright absurd.The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,while bored arena crowds for once look eager,hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizesshall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
Sylvia Plath
I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk
Sylvia Plath
And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.
Sylvia Plath
Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.
Sylvia Plath
Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
Sylvia Plath
How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
Sylvia Plath
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
Sylvia Plath
She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.
Sylvia Plath
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
Sylvia Plath
I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.
Sylvia Plath
I fancied you'd return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath
The tongues of hell are dull.
Sylvia Plath
Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.
Sylvia Plath
The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.
Sylvia Plath
All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.
Sylvia Plath
I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.
Sylvia Plath
I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.
Sylvia Plath
Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.
Sylvia Plath
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
Sylvia Plath
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
Sylvia Plath
If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?
Sylvia Plath
Fixed stars govern a life
Sylvia Plath
I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.
Sylvia Plath
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.
Sylvia Plath
Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.
Sylvia Plath
I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
Sylvia Plath
I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.
Sylvia Plath