Sylvia Plath quote: "I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:<br />It is what you fear.<br />I do not fear it: I have been there.<br /><br />--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962"

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic...
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I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.
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There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize sudd...
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I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.
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What I want back is what I was.
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I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every sto...
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Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
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How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.
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It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...
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If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.
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The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses...
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I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round a...
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dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I ...
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Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of...
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I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost lik...
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But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion
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I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an ...
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What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve...
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I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the m...
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For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
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I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.
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Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling,...
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I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middl...
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I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and ...
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I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I...
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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.
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I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.
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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...
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Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physi...
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God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" ...
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And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I h...
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Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out o...
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Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting...
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I woke to the sound of rain.
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Is there no way out of the mind?
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The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
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How frail the human heart must be --a mirrored pool of thought...
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I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
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Widow. The word consumes itself.
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If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as ...
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The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm
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Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
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If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life ...
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Every woman adores a Fascist.
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I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to re...
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I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of...
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I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and ...
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I am a victim of introspection.
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For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possi...
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I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wis...
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Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small spac...
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I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed ove...
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Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
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I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
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When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
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I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join th...
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I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience poss...
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Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English...
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And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the...
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The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it.
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We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'...
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Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass s...
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Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
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The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
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A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self...
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I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the poi...
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Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primit...
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Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I ha...
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I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have...
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Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and ei...
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Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to b...
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How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your ...
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I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself...
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Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty toge...
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I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every sto...
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I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.
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I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I a...
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I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
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I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know ...
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Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my...
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I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
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And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at ...
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let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
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I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can ...
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In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five...
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My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the A...
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My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the a...
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Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem...
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What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off fro...
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Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when...
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There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
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I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bo...
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Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want ...
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I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.
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If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
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A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.
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Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for ...
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I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
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If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
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I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every br...
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There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surf...
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If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowin...
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When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I craw...
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I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide...
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Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and...
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Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that...
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I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rat...
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I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am t...
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If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as...
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I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the t...
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I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight d...
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because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be...
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I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry,...
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There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows fr...
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What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
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I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies,...
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Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I ...
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That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Where...
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We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
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There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, ...
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I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.
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I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a gr...
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Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college,...
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There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm ...
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When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
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How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To re...
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So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding qui...
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I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery tur...
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A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, fe...
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One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
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Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become a...
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That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.
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My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated...
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After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.
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I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962
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If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something be...
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I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
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I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut...
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The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
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How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
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I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy wear...
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Ennui

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing...
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I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
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Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
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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...
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The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark...
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Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
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There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
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What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
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Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling...
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I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will
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My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing ...
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...I still expected to see Doreen's body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete tes...
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I felt like a race horse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly con...
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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...
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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...
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The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comf...
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I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into ...
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So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.
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I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life...
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How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?
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There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make...
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I think I may well be a Jew.
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With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is li...
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Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s he...
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There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minu...
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I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de...
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The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
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When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photogr...
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The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
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The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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.
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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...
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I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but...
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What is so real as the cry of a child?
A rabbit's cry may be wilder
But it has no soul.
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You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult ki...
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It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...
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Hastanenin arazisi yeni yağmış karla örtülüydü -bu bir Noel serpintisi değil, ocak ayının ...
SYLVIA PLATH

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962

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Sylvia Plath

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962

Sylvia Plath

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I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:It is what you fear.I do not fear it: I have been there.--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962

Sylvia Plath

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Related

More Sylvia Plath

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962