Sylvia Plath Short Quotes

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.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

It was sometime in October, she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn't want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over. The Tide ebbed, sucked back into itself. There I was, a reject, with the dried black seaweed whose hard beads I liked to pop, hollowed orange and grapefruit halves and a garbage of shells. All at once, old and lonely, I eyed these-- razor clams, fairy boats, weedy mussels, the oyster's pocked gray lace (there was never a pearl) and tiny white "ice cream cones." You could always tell where the best shells were-- at the rim of the last wave, marked by a mascara of tar. I picked up, frigidly, a stiff pink starfish. It lay at the heart of my palm, a joke dummy of my own hand. Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple ‘lucky stones’ I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath.

[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.

Being mythological does wonders for one's ego.

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell- tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower.

Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.

NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs,” she told her Smith College students in 1958. “BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING.

Privilegiul de a fi oricine își arată și cealaltă față - a presiunii de a fi ca toată lumea și prin urmare - nimeni.

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

I feel stuffy, as if there were not enough air to breathe - hot, and uneasy. Two months of no exercise have made me weak and plegmatic mentally and physically. On the short walk from here to the libe I drink the cold pure night air and the clear unbelievably delicate crescent-moonlight with a greedy reverence. Days are bizarre collections of hothouse languidities, mystical and poignant sensuous quotations (white thy fambles, red thy gan, and thy quarrons dainty is ... " Dark, liquid loveliness of words half dimly understood.)

Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.

Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized.

But not so odd a name, after all, if you’ve ever read through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and Sasparilla Greenleafs. I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren’t called Smith.

Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images.

Sunt o persoană importantă. Dacă ajungi să mă cunoști, vei vedea ce persoană importantă sunt. Uită-te în ochii mei! Sărută-mă și vei vedea ce persoană importantă sunt!

He fathomed her, enclosed her. He did not see, or did not care to see, how her submissiveness moved and drew him, nor how now, through the steaming, suffocating baths of mist, she led him, and he followed, though the rainbows under the clear water were lost.

Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.

Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves

And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.

I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he welds and wields...and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.

A veces pienso que no poseo imagen alguna tan precisa como la del Mar".

I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.

I just sat there with the whole summer turning sour in my mouth.

He felt the ground frail as a bird’s skull under his feet, a mere shell of sanity and decorum between him and the dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source.

Van valami végleges abban, ahogyan valaki eltűnik lassan az úton, nem fordul meg, nem néz vissza. (…) Van valami végtelenül nyomorúságos, végtelenül végleges az üres útban. Csak mégy tovább, hallgatsz. (Egy júniusi nap)

Van egy nap, amelyet sosem fogsz elfelejteni, bármennyire próbálod is. Mindig eszedbe jut, amikor eljön a nyár, s már eléggé meleg az idő az evezéshez. Amikor itt az első kéklő júniusi nap, kél az emlék, elevenen, kristálytisztán, mintha könnyeken át látnád… (Egy júniusi nap)

-Tudom – mondta csöndesen Tracy –, de mégis meg fogsz változni, akár akarod, akár nem. Semmi nem marad ugyanaz. Semmi, gondolta Millicent. Milyen rémes is lenne, ha az ember sosem változna… ha az élete végéig az a néhány évvel korábbi, unalmas és szégyenlős Millicent maradna. Szerencsére azonban az ember mindig változik, fejlődik, halad. (Beavatás)

I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,

A los poetas con los que me deleito, sus poemas los poseen tanto como el ritmo de su respiración.

I shall be, in the future, omnipresent.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

They are good evidence to prove that poems which seem often to be constructed of arbitrary surreal symbols are really impassioned reorganizations of relevant fact.

For me,” she wrote, “poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose.” Throughout

The shadow in my mind lengthened with the night blotting out our half of the world, and beyond it; the whole globe seemed sunk in darkness.

memory throws a kind of halo around him.

I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren’t called Smith. Anyhow,

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.” ― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

digestible enough to be written out in short stories and poems, when I had a certain slickness that is enviable now,

His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for something, but I couldn't think what it would be short for, unless it was California.

BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING.

no tenía el mar poder suficiente para concedernos cualquier cosa? Yo no perdía la esperanza.

Ez volt színes, szélesvásznú álmaim időszaka. Anyám úgy hitte, óriási mennyiségű alvásra van szükségem, így aztán sosem voltam igazán fáradt, amikor lefeküdtem. Ez volt a nap legjobb része, amikor fekhettem a megfoghatatlan félhomályban, félálomban, formálva fejemben tulajdon álmaimat. Repülő álmaim oly hihetőek voltak, akár Dalí tájképei, oly valóságosak, hogy hirtelen összerándulva ébredtem belőlük, azzal a fulladó érzéssel, hogy Ikaroszként hulltam alá az égből, s éppen idejében fogott föl puha ágyam. (Superman és Paula Brown új kezeslábasa)

She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could. She was, in the words of a close friend, “operatic” in her desires, a “Renaissance woman” molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New England stoicism.5 She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeats’s gongs and gyres as Frost’s silences and snow.

She was, [Wilfrid Riley] recalled, "a very clever person, but you couldn't be at ease with her some way. She wasn't with you. She was up in the clouds, always studying poetry, what have you . . . You couldn't sit with her and converse with her like you can normal people." It wasn't pride, he thought, that made her this way. "Shyness came into it. She couldn't lend herself to people. She was a little bit aloof from people, and I don't think she intended to be.

Where was life? It dissipated, vanished into thin air, and my life stood weighed and found wanting because it had no ready-made novel plot, because I couldn’t simply sit down at the typewriter and by sheer genius and willpower begin a novel dense and fascinating today and finish it next month. Where, how, with what and for what, to begin? No incident in my life seemed ready to stand up for even a twenty-page story. I sat paralyzed, feeling no person in the world to speak to, cut off totally from humanity, in a self-induced vacuum: I felt sicker and sicker. I couldn’t happily be anything but a writer and I couldn’t be a writer. I couldn’t even set down one sentence. I was paralyzed with fear. . . .” She

As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention. If I had been born of Italian parents in one of the caves in the hills I would be a prostitute at the age of 12 or so because I had to live (why?) and that was the only way open. If I was born into a wealthy New York family with pseudo-cultural leanings, I would have had my coming-out party along with the rest of them, and be equipped with fur coats, social contacts, and a blase pout. How do I know? I don't; I can only guess. I wouldn't be I. But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of "I" that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratches on the paper... I... I... I... I... I... I.

I must write about the things of the world with no glazing.” She fought doggedly against the great suction into her own subjectivity: “I shall perish if I can write about no one but myself.” Something like this went through nearly every entry in her journal over long periods. In

Then I knew what the trouble was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

Olyan tökéletes júniusi nap van, amilyet mindig szeretnél leírni, de sosem sikerül. Képzeld el a frissen mosott vászon illatát, az eső után száradó édes fűét, képzeld el a sávokban táncoló napfényt a réten, a mentalevelek ízét a nyelveden, a tulipánok fess ragyogását a kertben, zöld, sárgává fogyó, kékké növekvő árnyak… a vakító fény… a nap forró érintése a bőrödön… a napfény vakító nyílvesszői, amint visszapattannak a víz mély, üveges kékjéről…az elragadtatás… növekvő, szétpattanó buborékok… a sikló mozgás… a víz folyékony éneke az evező nyomán… táncoló színfoltok: mindezt szeretni kell, dédelgetni. Soha többé nem jő ilyen nap! (Egy júniusi nap)

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shorted to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. If I had to strain my brain with any more of that stuff I would go mad. I would fail outright. It was only by a horrible effort of will that I had dragged myself through the first half of the year.

Plath was determined to play her part, but, as Stevenson’s speech suggests, the odds were against her. She lived in a shamelessly discriminatory age when it was almost impossible for a woman to get a mortgage, loan, or credit card; when newspapers divided their employment ads between men and women (“Attractive Please!”); the word “pregnant” was banned from network television; and popular magazines encouraged wives to remain quiet because, as one advice columnist put it, “his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

Out in the radish fields, she did not have to impress, outthink, or outperform anyone.

Yet Sylvia told others she was "daring to live the way most people dream of living when they are fifty: to sacrifice all for our ideal of a good life, not other people's cars & securities & 10 year leases.

Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning love...The panther wakes and stalks again. She "lay, burning, fevered with this disease

She could swim in him: that incredible violent presence of his: leashed.

I am living now in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought. I took care, such care, and even that was not enough, for my being deserted utterly.

She told Aurelia he was a "a violent Adam," "a breaker of things and people," "arrogant, used to walking over women like a blast of Jove's lightning," she had spent less than a week with him.

Life seems a mockery....I can't go on like this," she railed. She wished for a sinus infection, which would at least provide "escapism." When one feels like leaving college and killing oneself over one course which actually nauseates one, it is a rather serious thing.

My head is bloody, but unbowed / May children's bones bedeck my shroud.' Sylvia felt physically and emotionally trapped by the house and all its demands; "Learning the limitations of a woman's sphere is no fun at all.

What other woman would dare to draw blood with a kiss? He saw in Plath the same things she had found in his early poems–a fascination with what he would later call "positive violence,

Plath portrayed Hughes as a creator and destroyer of worlds, who spared little sentiment for the women he loved and left.

I will not let myself get sick, go mad or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else's shoulder. Masks are the order of the day-and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.

Because Picasso could no longer imitate, he innovated. Plath does the same in “Daddy,” her surreal poem of rupture.

Like her Joycean hero Stephen Dedalus, she was filled with “Icarian lust”: she would seek out her destiny abroad, collect experience for her art, and stay in motion.10 Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized. Plath spread her wings, over and over, at a time when women were not supposed to fly.

The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.

The Evil Times," Hughes later wrote, "were those two or three hours between the effects of one dose wearing off, and the effect of the next dose taking hold, in the early morning. In the last paragraph of her diary, she described her fear of the horror of these hours.

113 Alvarez would include Plath and Anne Sexton in his second edition in 1966, realizing too late that it was not Hughes but Plath whose work best articulated the sound and sense of the new poetry. He later called her exclusion from the first edition a “terrible mistake.

She approved of the new title he’d suggested, “The Elm Speaks,” and sent him a new batch of poems on October 12: “A Birthday Present,” “The Detective,” “The Courage of Quietness” (retitled “The Courage of Shutting-Up”), “For a Fatherless Son,” “The Applicant,” “Daddy,” and her five bee poems. Moss would reject them all.

Courting violence, as Plath’s early drafts of Falcon Yard show, was something of an aesthetic stance, and part of the couple’s shared mythology.

Ted felt guilty enough about what he did that he later unburdened himself to someone, probably Olwyn. According to Sylvia’s September 1962 letter to Dr. Beuscher, nothing like it ever happened again.

Plath expresses horror at how an entire male humanist tradition, epitomized by her German professor father, has failed.

Does “nothing between us” mean severance or closeness?

Indeed, as the critics Paul Giles and Robin Peel have noted, the worst of the Cuban missile crisis occurred during the last two weeks of October 1962; the period from the 22nd to the 27th marked the most terrifying phase of brinksmanship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, when Americans and Russians confronted the prospect of nuclear annihilation on a daily basis.

Plath found in Alvarez’s war against gentility a kind of proto-feminism, for women had the most to gain—and the most to lose—by shedding decorum.

If there is an unsung hero in Sylvia Plath’s life, it is Olive Prouty.

Her fear of that life had led her to flee Dick, Gordon, Wellesley, America. The final lines of “Ariel” are a referendum on the unconventional path she had chosen as she took stock of her life on her thirtieth birthday.

as he passed on some of the greatest poems of the twentieth century: “Ariel,” “Purdah,” “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Fever 103°,” “Poppies in October,” and “Sheep in Fog,” among others. The New Yorker still thought of itself as a family magazine, and these poems were too shocking for a publication that sat on living room coffee tables.

He famously—and condescendingly—told the class that they should aspire to be superlative mothers and housewives and that their main role was to support their husbands.

Plath had been inspired by an article she had read in the Writer’s Yearbook, advising her to think of herself as a woman first, and a writer second—otherwise, every rejection would throw her “into depression.” If she identified herself too closely with her craft, the failures would seem like “grievous wounds” to her sense of “personal worth.

I encountered two things for the first time in my first few weeks in Cambridge: anti-feminism and anti-Semitism. Both were a real shock. I don’t mean that they were everywhere but they certainly existed, and Sylvia must have found herself brought up against them too.

They never taught us that women had only been admitted to full membership of the university in 1948. They said nothing. They were tame.

She ended up spending her career teaching at Newnham, where she helped change the culture to one of strong female fellowship.

that final wry sour lemon acid in the veins of single clever lonely women.

That October, 1955, Sylvia still imagined nothing would hold her back. She was excited to meet her academic supervisor, Miss Kathleen (Kay) Burton, and looked forward to attending her lectures and tutorials

favorite piece of furniture, a coffee table….She apparently would often remark on how much she ‘enjoyed that table,’ thereby unconsciously regaling her English visitors,

Plath’s adoption of a mid-Atlantic accent by 1958 suggests that she felt such pressures and tried to conform. (Jane said that when she listened to Sylvia’s later poetry recordings, she did “not recognize her voice.

The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and as necessary for me…as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.” Writing was purgation and fulfillment, even if “the actual story never lives up to the dream.

He felt she wanted more from him than he could give. Sylvia quoted his letter to Ellie: “ ‘two years of army…and I must make a fortune and only then found a family, and always in the holy skies our love is and will be: someday; meanwhile, I must be noble and give you your freedom.

enough rhetoric, enough overwhelming push of any kind, enough of the dark gods, enough of the id, enough of the Angelic powers and the heroic efforts to make new worlds. They’d seen it all turn into death camps and atomic bombs. All they wanted was to get back into civvies and get home to the wife and kids and for the rest of their lives not a thing was going to interfere with a nice cigarette and a view of the park….Now I came a bit later. I hadn’t had enough. I was all for opening negotiations with whatever happened to be out there.

Baskin remembered her “glacial, punitive fury”; she refused to speak to him for twenty-four hours.