Quotes By Letter: P

“You make me hate what I see when I look at me.”

-The Pixies

~

“Carve your name into my arm.
Instead of stressed, I lie here charmed.”

-Every Me Every You, Placebo

Recommended by Shay.

~

“Alienated individuals are condemned to lives spent effectively watching themselves.”

-Sadie Plant

~

“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self-- like a disease of the blood dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.”

-Sylvia Plath

~

“When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time... When I was crazy, that's all I was.”

-Sylvia Plath

~

“It was my last act of love.”

-after her first major suicide attempt, Sylvia Plath

~

“From her lips ampersands and percent signs
Exit like kisses.
It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.
What am I to make of these contradictions?
I wear white cuffs, I bow.”

-An Appearance, Sylvia Plath

~

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

-Apprehensions, Sylvia Plath

~

“What a thrill --
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.”

-Cut, Sylvia Plath

Recommended by Kate.

~

“The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”

-Edge, Sylvia Plath

~

“I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

-Elm, Sylvia Plath

~

“brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.”

-Firesong, Sylvia Plath

~

“I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still.”

-from a poem when she was 15 or 16, Sylvia Plath

~

“The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.”

-Kindness, Sylvia Plath

~

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.”

-Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

~

“I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.”

-Last Words, Sylvia Plath

~

“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.)”

-Mad Girl's Love Song, Sylvia Plath

~

“Sad Hamlet, with a knife?
Where do you stash your life?”

-Stopped Dead, Sylvia Plath

~

“I am exhausted, I am exhausted ----
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.”

-The Bee Meeting, Sylvia Plath

~

“They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.”

-The Bee Meeting, Sylvia Plath

~

“'I can't dance.'

'You don't have to dance. I'll do the dancing.'

Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, 'Pretend you are drowning.'

I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, 'It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one,' and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“...where I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.

It was my last night.

I grasped the bundled I carried and pulled at a pale tail. A strapless elasticized slip which, in the course of wear, had lost its elasticity, slumped into my hand. I waved it, like a flag of truce, once, twice...The breeze caught it and I let go.

A white flake floated out into the night, and began its slow descent. I wondered on what street or rooftop it would come to rest.

I tugged at the bundle again.

The wind made an effort, but ailed, and a batlike shadow sank towards the roof garden of the penthouse opposite.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, they way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

Navigation

Back to 'Quotes'
Back to 'Do You SI?'