Sylvia Plath quote: "I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk"

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic...
SYLVIA PLATH

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.
SYLVIA PLATH

There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize sudd...
SYLVIA PLATH

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.
SYLVIA PLATH

What I want back is what I was.
SYLVIA PLATH

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every sto...
SYLVIA PLATH

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
SYLVIA PLATH

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.
SYLVIA PLATH

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...
SYLVIA PLATH

If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.
SYLVIA PLATH

The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses...
SYLVIA PLATH

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round a...
SYLVIA PLATH

dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I ...
SYLVIA PLATH

Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of...
SYLVIA PLATH

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost lik...
SYLVIA PLATH

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion
SYLVIA PLATH

I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an ...
SYLVIA PLATH

What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve...
SYLVIA PLATH

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the m...
SYLVIA PLATH

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
SYLVIA PLATH

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

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling,...
SYLVIA PLATH

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middl...
SYLVIA PLATH

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I...
SYLVIA PLATH

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they die...
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How we need another soul to cling to.
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I talk to God but the sky is empty.
SYLVIA PLATH

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

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no m...
SYLVIA PLATH

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physi...
SYLVIA PLATH

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" ...
SYLVIA PLATH

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I h...
SYLVIA PLATH

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out o...
SYLVIA PLATH

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting...
SYLVIA PLATH

I woke to the sound of rain.
SYLVIA PLATH

Is there no way out of the mind?
SYLVIA PLATH

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
SYLVIA PLATH

How frail the human heart must be --a mirrored pool of thought...
SYLVIA PLATH

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
SYLVIA PLATH

Widow. The word consumes itself.
SYLVIA PLATH

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as ...
SYLVIA PLATH

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm
SYLVIA PLATH

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
SYLVIA PLATH

If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life ...
SYLVIA PLATH

Every woman adores a Fascist.
SYLVIA PLATH

I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to re...
SYLVIA PLATH

I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of...
SYLVIA PLATH

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I am a victim of introspection.
SYLVIA PLATH

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possi...
SYLVIA PLATH

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wis...
SYLVIA PLATH

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small spac...
SYLVIA PLATH

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed ove...
SYLVIA PLATH

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
SYLVIA PLATH

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
SYLVIA PLATH

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
SYLVIA PLATH

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join th...
SYLVIA PLATH

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience poss...
SYLVIA PLATH

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English...
SYLVIA PLATH

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the...
SYLVIA PLATH

The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it.
SYLVIA PLATH

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'...
SYLVIA PLATH

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass s...
SYLVIA PLATH

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
SYLVIA PLATH

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
SYLVIA PLATH

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self...
SYLVIA PLATH

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the poi...
SYLVIA PLATH

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primit...
SYLVIA PLATH

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I ha...
SYLVIA PLATH

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have...
SYLVIA PLATH

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and ei...
SYLVIA PLATH

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to b...
SYLVIA PLATH

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself...
SYLVIA PLATH

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty toge...
SYLVIA PLATH

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every sto...
SYLVIA PLATH

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

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I a...
SYLVIA PLATH

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

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know ...
SYLVIA PLATH

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my...
SYLVIA PLATH

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
SYLVIA PLATH

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at ...
SYLVIA PLATH

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
SYLVIA PLATH

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can ...
SYLVIA PLATH

In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five...
SYLVIA PLATH

My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the A...
SYLVIA PLATH

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the a...
SYLVIA PLATH

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem...
SYLVIA PLATH

What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off fro...
SYLVIA PLATH

Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when...
SYLVIA PLATH

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
SYLVIA PLATH

I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bo...
SYLVIA PLATH

Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.
SYLVIA PLATH

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
SYLVIA PLATH

A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.
SYLVIA PLATH

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
SYLVIA PLATH

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
SYLVIA PLATH

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every br...
SYLVIA PLATH

There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surf...
SYLVIA PLATH

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowin...
SYLVIA PLATH

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I craw...
SYLVIA PLATH

I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide...
SYLVIA PLATH

Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and...
SYLVIA PLATH

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that...
SYLVIA PLATH

I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rat...
SYLVIA PLATH

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am t...
SYLVIA PLATH

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as...
SYLVIA PLATH

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the t...
SYLVIA PLATH

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight d...
SYLVIA PLATH

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be...
SYLVIA PLATH

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry,...
SYLVIA PLATH

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows fr...
SYLVIA PLATH

What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
SYLVIA PLATH

I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies,...
SYLVIA PLATH

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I ...
SYLVIA PLATH

That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Where...
SYLVIA PLATH

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
SYLVIA PLATH

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
SYLVIA PLATH

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a gr...
SYLVIA PLATH

Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college,...
SYLVIA PLATH

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm ...
SYLVIA PLATH

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
SYLVIA PLATH

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To re...
SYLVIA PLATH

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding qui...
SYLVIA PLATH

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery tur...
SYLVIA PLATH

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, fe...
SYLVIA PLATH

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
SYLVIA PLATH

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become a...
SYLVIA PLATH

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.
SYLVIA PLATH

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated...
SYLVIA PLATH

After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.
SYLVIA PLATH

I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962
SYLVIA PLATH

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something be...
SYLVIA PLATH

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
SYLVIA PLATH

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut...
SYLVIA PLATH

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
SYLVIA PLATH

How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
SYLVIA PLATH

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy wear...
SYLVIA PLATH

Ennui

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing...
SYLVIA PLATH

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
SYLVIA PLATH

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
SYLVIA PLATH

If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.
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I don't know how long I kept at it...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and la...
SYLVIA PLATH

The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark...
SYLVIA PLATH

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
SYLVIA PLATH

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
SYLVIA PLATH

What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
SYLVIA PLATH

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling...
SYLVIA PLATH

I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will
SYLVIA PLATH

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing ...
SYLVIA PLATH

...I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete tes...
SYLVIA PLATH

I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly con...
SYLVIA PLATH

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
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Tree and Stone glittered, without shadows.My finger-length grew lucent as glass.I started to bud lik...
SYLVIA PLATH

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the bri...
SYLVIA PLATH

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comf...
SYLVIA PLATH

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into ...
SYLVIA PLATH

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

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life...
SYLVIA PLATH

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?
SYLVIA PLATH

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make...
SYLVIA PLATH

I think I may well be a Jew.
SYLVIA PLATH

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is li...
SYLVIA PLATH

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s he...
SYLVIA PLATH

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minu...
SYLVIA PLATH

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de...
SYLVIA PLATH

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther...
SYLVIA PLATH

I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too clo...
SYLVIA PLATH

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
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But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn...
SYLVIA PLATH

I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
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I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
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That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite secu...
SYLVIA PLATH

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
SYLVIA PLATH

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photogr...
SYLVIA PLATH

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
SYLVIA PLATH

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
SYLVIA PLATH

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is ...
SYLVIA PLATH

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being ...
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My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off ...
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I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the ...
SYLVIA PLATH

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.
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What did my arms do before they held you?
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I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.
SYLVIA PLATH

Is anyone anywhere happy?
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I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to rea...
SYLVIA PLATH

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but...
SYLVIA PLATH

What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
SYLVIA PLATH

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult ki...
SYLVIA PLATH

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...
SYLVIA PLATH

Hastanenin arazisi yeni yağmış karla örtülüydü -bu bir Noel serpintisi değil, ocak ayının ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk

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Sylvia Plath

I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk

Sylvia Plath

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