"I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Sylvia Plath quotes (page 16 of 31)
610 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I don't know what started me, I just wrote poetry from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional."
Read quote
6 likes
"I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important."
Read quote
6 likes
"I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini."
Read quote
6 likes
"I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid."
Read quote
6 likes
"Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals."
Read quote
6 likes
"A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin."
Read quote
6 likes
"Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar."
Read quote
6 likes
"I am made, crudely, for success."
Read quote
6 likes
"This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself."
Read quote
6 likes
"Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape."
Read quote
6 likes
"So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state."
Read quote
6 likes
"The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things."
Read quote
6 likes
"I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to."
Read quote
6 likes
"The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms 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."
Read quote
6 likes
"Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?"
Read quote
6 likes
"I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old."
Read quote
6 likes
"The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life."
Read quote
6 likes
"You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?"
Read quote
6 likes
"I woke to the sound of rain."
Read quote
5 likes