Sylvia Plath Quotes

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

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

“Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”

“I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.”

“if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?”

“Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”

“We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!”

“The promise of Plath's work was that a woman could de-fang the charges of hysteria by owning them. Unlike Solanas, who seemingly never saw herself as flawed or sick, or Wollstonecraft and Bronte, who swept their flaws under the carpet so as not to compromise themselves, or even Jacobs, who was honest, but played a delicate game of apologizing for "sins" that were not her fault so as to reach her audience, Plath took her own flaws as her subject, and thereby made them the source of her authority. By detailing her own overabundant inner life, no matter how huge and frightening it was -- her sexuality, her suicidality, her broken relationships, her anger at the world or at men -- she could, in some crucial way, own that part of her story, simply because she chose to tell it. And, if she could do this, other women could do it, too.”

“Between Sylvia and me there existed as between my own mother and me - a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy (words from Aurelia Plath from the Introduction)”

“Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.”