Quote

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

Sylvia Plath

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sylvia Plath
Age: 30 †
Born: 1932
Born: October 27
Died: 1963
Died: February 11
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Victoria Lucas
Sylvia Plath Hughes
Constantly
Choice
Choices
Passive
Happy
Feminism
Classic
Mad
Sadness
Active

More quotes by Sylvia Plath

Image
Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Sylvia Plath
Image
Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.
Sylvia Plath
Image
After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.
Sylvia Plath
Image
The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
Sylvia Plath
Image
What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.
Sylvia Plath
Image
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.
Sylvia Plath
Image
They would grow old. They would forget me.
Sylvia Plath
Image
I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
Sylvia Plath
Image
I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with.
Sylvia Plath
Image
…'It always has to end, doesn't it? We always have to separate.' 'Yes,' I said. He was insistent, 'But it doesn't always have to be that way. We could be together some day for always.' 'Oh, no,' I told him, wondering if he knew it was all over. 'We keep running till we die. We separate, get further apart, till we are dead.
Sylvia Plath
Image
No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.
Sylvia Plath
Image
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.
Sylvia Plath
Image
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.
Sylvia Plath
Image
But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
Sylvia Plath
Image
It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual.
Sylvia Plath
Image
The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.
Sylvia Plath
Image
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
Sylvia Plath
Image
My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.
Sylvia Plath
Image
Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man.
Sylvia Plath
Image
In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia Plath