Quotes from Sylvia Plath

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.

I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off.

S?rça fanusun içinde ölü bir bebek gibi t?kan?p kalm?? biri için dünyan?n kendisi kötü bir düÅŸtür. Bir gün bir yerde -okulda, Avrupa'da, herhangi bir yerde- o boÄŸucu çarp?tmalar?yla s?rça fanusun yeniden üzerime inmeyeceÄŸini nas?l bilebilirdim?

My hours are married to shadow.

All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen. A far sea moves in my ear. --from Morning Song, written 19 February 1961

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

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. --from Tale of a Tub, written 1956

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

But the life of a Willa Cather, a Lillian Helman, and Virginia Woolf - - - would it not be a series of rapid ascents and probing descents into shades and meanings — into more people, ideas and conceptions? Would it not be in color, rather than black-and-white, or more gray? I think it would. And thus, I not being them, could try to be more like them: to listen, observe, and feel, and try to live more fully.

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water—as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering Blue and mystical over the face of the stars Inside the church, the saints will all be blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.

I felt myself shrink to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground.

As I paddled on, mt heartbeat boomed like a motor in my ears. I am I am I am.

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure.

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

My skin is broken out from subconscious anxiety and tension, self-induced. Nothing is more difficult than lashing a vagrant mind suddenly into long self-imposed stints of concentration.

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.