Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego. "

Sylvia Plath

Purpose

Discipline

" Wear your heart on your skin in this life. "

" When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels. "

" When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time. "

" A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth. "

" One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. "

" Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes. "

" It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism. "

" I have a visual imagination. "

Sylvia Plath

Visual

Imagination

" I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.' "

" I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again. "

" Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon. "

" I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. "

" Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind. "

" I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched. "

" For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen - skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women. "

" Widow. The word consumes itself. "

" The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. "

" I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name. "

" Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it. "

" Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go. "

" There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. "

" I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea. "

" My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen. "

" There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job. "

" I am a victim of introspection. "

Sylvia Plath

Introspection

I Am

" Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. "

" Every woman adores a Fascist. "

" I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. "

" Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury. "