59 quotes
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.
Ariel (1965)
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices (1962)
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware.
Beware. Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Ariel (1965)
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
The Bell Jar (1963)
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen — physical or psychological — wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1976)
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Ariel (1965)
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
Ariel (1965)
These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.
Crossing the Water (1971)
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Ariel (1965)
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.
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 some private, totalitarian state.
The Bell Jar (1963)
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
The Bell Jar (1963)
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Ariel (1965)
Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? — Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults,
That kill, that kill, that kill.
Ariel (1965)