"I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling."
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Quote collection
Sylvia Plath quotes (page 22 of 31)
610 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I felt wise and cynical as all hell."
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"But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many…?"
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"In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real."
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"Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting."
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"I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address."
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"I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose."
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"In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home."
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"If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song."
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"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."
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"The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete."
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"I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was."
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"I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives."
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"Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry."
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"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."
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"I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface."
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"I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good."
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"…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches."
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"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."
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"The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you."
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