Top 673 Quotes & Sayings by Sylvia Plath - Page 3

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

I am myself. That is not enough.

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

O love, how did you get here?

I am not cruel, only truthful.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

I am what I feel and think and do.

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording - all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values.

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "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 lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

Character is fate.

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.

I dream too much, work too little.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

You smile. No, it is not fatal.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.