Sylvia Plath

Poet, Novelist

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist, known for her confessional style and her impactful work, 'The Bell Jar'.

Born
October 27, 1932
Died
February 11, 1963
Quotes
610
Rank
#23

Quote collection

Sylvia Plath quotes (page 29 of 31)

610 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Sylvia Plath Poet, Novelist
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"I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again."

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"Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel."

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"A psychiatrist is the god of our age. But they cost money."

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"Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?"

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"I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it."

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"My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing."

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"She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony."

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"We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate."

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"Talking about my fears to others feeds it."

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"I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction."

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"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?"

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"Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?"

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"What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from."

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"Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy & peaceful."

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"Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know."

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"It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual."

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"I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks."

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"The day I went into physics class it was death."

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"The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had."

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