Quotes from Plath: Poems

Sylvia Plath ·  256 pages

Rating: (1.4K votes)


“O love, how did you get here?

--Nick and the Candlestick”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“There is more than one good way to drown.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up
and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“The storerooms are full of hearts.
This is the city of spare parts.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won't notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems



“Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“the cat unsheathes its claws
the world turns”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems



“You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness.”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


“Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have”
― Sylvia Plath, quote from Plath: Poems


About the author

Sylvia Plath
Born place: in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, The United States
Born date October 27, 1932
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Popular quotes

“Christopher . . . are these from you?” she asked at lunch, careful to make her tone light as she placed the two picture-poems on the table. Christopher’s eyes fell to them, and he smiled.
“Yes.”
He didn’t ask if she liked them, and he didn’t seem embarrassed.
Sarah was flustered, and somewhat surprised by Christopher’s easy confidence. Even so, her natural suspicion surfaced. “Why?”
“Because,” he answered seriously, “you make a good subject. Your hair, for one, is like a shimmering waterfall. It’s so fair that it catches the light. It makes you seem like you have a halo about you. And your eyes—they’re such a pure color, not washed out at all, deep as the ocean. And your expression . . . intense and yet somehow detached, as if you see more of the world than the rest of us.”
Flustered, she could think of no way to respond. Did he just say this stuff from the top of his head? Only her strict Vida control kept her from blushing.
Meanwhile Nissa entered the cafeteria. She started to sit, then glanced from the pictures, to Christopher, to Sarah. “Should I go somewhere else?”
Christopher nodded to a chair, answering easily, “Sit down. We aren’t exchanging dark secrets—yet.”
Nissa flashed a teasing look to her brother as she took a seat. “As his sister, I feel the need to inform you, Sarah, that Christopher has been talking about you incessantly.”
Christopher smiled, unembarrassed. “I suppose I might have been.’
“Especially your eyes—he never shuts up about your eyes,” Nissa confided, and this time Christopher shrugged.
“They’re beautiful,” he said casually. “Beauty should be looked at, not ignored. I try to capture it on paper, but that’s really impossible with eyes, because they have a life no still portrait can capture.”
Sarah’s voice was tied up so tightly she thought she might be able to speak again sometime next year. No one had ever talked about her—or to her—with such admiration.”
― Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, quote from Shattered Mirror


“I wish I had a book with me, since clearly I have a lot of time on my hands. I always carry around one or two, but we had to leave our backpacks on the bus.”
― Wendy Mass, quote from Finally


“You know a people have given up when they stop teaching their children.”
― Pierce Brown, quote from Morning Star


“There are hundreds of possible causes for every effect, and a hundred possible effects for every cause.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Seventh Son


“David what your mother did to you was wrong. Verry wrong.No child deserves to be treated like that. She's sick.”
― Dave Pelzer, quote from The Lost Boy


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