Sylvia Plath Quotes

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

Is anyone anywhere happy?

How we need another soul to cling to.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

I must learn more about these people — try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

The woman is perfected
Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.