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Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.

Sylvia Plath

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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
Discipline
Feels
Poetry
Turn
Small
Space
Turns
Tyrannical
Away
Fast
Feel

More quotes by Sylvia Plath

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If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.
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If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.
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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 brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
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Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity.
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I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
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Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.
Sylvia Plath
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God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.
Sylvia Plath
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There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.
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Character is fate.
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I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.
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There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
Sylvia Plath
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The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.
Sylvia Plath
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Why honey, don't you want to get dressed? My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon. I'm writing a novel, I said. I haven't got time to change into this and change into that.
Sylvia Plath
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I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
Sylvia Plath
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But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
Sylvia Plath
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We know a thing by its opposite corollary hot by having experienced cold good by having decided what is bad love by hate.
Sylvia Plath
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A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.
Sylvia Plath
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But I am I now and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.
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I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.
Sylvia Plath
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I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.
Sylvia Plath