#sylvia plath quotes
When Sylvia Plath wrote, ‘I was supposed to be having the time of my life.’ and when Sylvia Plath wrote, ’… but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.’ and when she wrote, ’… I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t,… and this made me even sadder and more tired.’ and when she wrote, 'what did I do but balk and balk like a dull cart horse?’
And when Sylvia Plath described the essence of society by saying, ’… because he thought all sickness was the sickness of the will.’ and when she said 'she wants…to be everything’ and when she wrote, 'What did I think was wrong? That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.’ and 'You’ll never get anywhere like that…’
When Sylvia Plath wrote, ‘I was supposed to be having the time of my life.’ and when Sylvia Plath wrote, ’… but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.’ and when she wrote, ’… I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t,… and this made me even sadder and more tired.’ and when she wrote, 'what did I do but balk and balk like a dull cart horse?’
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”–from “Mad Girl’s Love Song - A Villanelle”, 1954
“I made a model of you”
–from “Daddy”, 12 October 1962
“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.”
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 25, 1950
“I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.”–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962
“I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”
–The Bell Jar, Chapter Eight, 1963
“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
–The Bell Jar, Chapter One, 1963
“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”
–from “The Munich Mannequins”, 28 January 1963
“For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart–”–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962
“Everything is the same but different.”
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 132, 1952
“I am myself. That is not enough.”
–from “The Jailer”, 17 October 1962
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
–The Bell Jar, Chapter Five, 1963
“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end…“
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 63, 1951
“I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”–from “Mad Girl’s Love Song - A Villanelle”, 1954
“I felt very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
–The Bell Jar, Chapter One, 1963
“It is so much safer not to feel”
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 155, 1952
“I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful“
–“Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices“, March 1962
“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.”–from “Lesbos”, 18 October 1962
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962
“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.”—The Bell Jar, Chapter Seven, 1963
Is there no way out of the mind?
—Sylvia Plath, “Apprehensions”.
via stopcuttingurfringe on reddit
“Fig Juggling as an hommage to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, done by Eve Mansell at Bloom St Tattoo, Manchester UK “
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
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.”
–Sylvia Plath,The Bell Jar, Chapter Seven, 1963
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“I lift my lids and all is born again”
Mad Girl’s Love Song
A Villanelle
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
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 should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
–Sylvia Plath, written 1954, The Collected Poems, 1981
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Done by Dylan Kuiper at the Grand Illusion Tattoo in Melbourne, Australia.
***
“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”
–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962
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Sylvia Plath inspired fig tattoo by @sheilamarcello of Electric Tattoo in Asbury Park, NJ
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
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.”
–Sylvia Plath,The Bell Jar, Chapter Seven, 1963
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viaPrincess Prazsky on Twitter
Sylvia Plath meets René Magritte meets Princess Prazsky’s drawing
“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.”
–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 25, 1950
René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928
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via Twitter @LeapGilead
(Please don’t forget to also like the picture there)
ADMONITION
If you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You’ll cut the chord
Articulating song.
If you flay a beast
To marvel at the mane
You’ll wreck the rest
From which the fur began.
If you assault a fish
To analyze the fin
Your hands will crush
The generatihg bone.
If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.
–Sylvia Plath, in: The Collected Poems, Juvenilia 1952-1956, 1981
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Finally got around to mohawking my (awkwardly shaped) head and tattooing it. Couldn’t be more happy.
Idea for the fish patterned tattoo comes from the line “like a terrible fish” from Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Mirror” which I also have tattooed on my wrist.
Tattoo by Welt of Yama Tattoo Rome.
MIRROR
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
—written 23 October 1961, Sylvia Plath,The Collected Poems
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viahttps://elisabetholiver.home.blog/
Fever 103°
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ——
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ——
To Paradise.
–Sylvia Plath, written 20 October 1962,in:Ariel, 1965
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via Twitter @critical_much
(Please don’t forget to also like the picture there)
***
SOLILOQUY OF THE SOLIPSIST
I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
When my eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon’s celestial onion
Hangs high.
I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look’s leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.
I
When in good humour,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott color and forbid any flower
To be.
I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it’s quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.
–Sylvia Plath, “Soliloquy of the Solipsist”, 1956, in: The Collected Poems, 1981
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