Sylvia Plath Quotes

Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

Sometimes he thinks that if he could only trace the path of his life carefully enough, everything would become clear. The ways that he screwed up would make sense. He closes his eyes tightly. His life wasn't always a mistake, he thinks, and he breathes uncertainly for awhile, trying to find a pathway into unconsciousness, into sleep.

What was life asking of me? How could I respond when I didn't know the question?

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

Oh my god what am I doing with my life?

During those formative times, I really didn't know what was going on, and I was sort of torn in a thousand different directions with how I felt about what I was doing.

Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. I stumble towards my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

When I do it [writing] by myself, there's a lot more terror and uncertainty.

and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

You think you know me, but I'm not sure that even I know who I am anymore.

I actually didn't enjoy being a child particularly at all even though I had nice parents in a comfortable place to live. Just because I was too confused in generating too many answers for myself that just scared me more.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

ONE OF THE UNSETTLING THINGS about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end.

I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away.

He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

I was actually looking for answers where I kept asking myself - what am I doing?

There was a time where I was really confused about who I was and what I was doing, and I was just kind of depressed.

That's the bulk of my lyrical output - being confused and trying to find answers to my confusion.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

First I was 'angry,' then 'spiritual.' Now I don't know what I am.

I was going on years and years of auditions and being told I was too this, too that, not enough of this, not enough of that, to the point where I was so afraid and diluting myself into absolutely nothing...