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Sylvia Plath Quotes about Writing

All Sylvia Plath Quotes Age Art Bones Chaos Character Children College Cooking Darkness Depression Desire Discipline Doubt Earth Emptiness Fate Fear Feelings Feminism Fighting Giving Gold Happiness Hate Heart Hell Home Hurt Illness Inspirational Joy Kissing Life Loneliness Love Love Life Lying Madness Mask Mental Illness Moon Morning Pain Past Rain Reading Rejection Responsibility Running Sad Sadness Sickness Silence Silver Skins Sleep Soul Spring Summer Understanding Vision Waiting Wall Water Winter Writing quotes

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

Writing, Voice, Stills

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.56, Faber & Faber

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Life, Sad, Writing

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.85, Anchor

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

Writing, Feminism, Classic

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.184, Anchor

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

Rain, Writing, August

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.9, Anchor

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

Jealous, Writing, Thinking

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.20, Anchor

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Success, Writing, Stink

Barry Kyle, Sylvia Plath (1976). “Sylvia Plath, a Dramatic Portrait: Conceived and Adapted from Her Writings, by Barry Kyle”

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Jobs, Writing, Expression

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.81, Anchor

I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can't understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I'm fascinated by this mastery of the practical.

Sports, Writing, Mean

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

Depression, Stars, Writing

Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

Fall, Writing, Thinking

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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.

Writing, Sitting, Matter

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.220, Faber & Faber

* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.

Silly, Writing, Gay

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

Life, Home, Writing

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."

Writing, Ideas, Excuse

Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.33, Anchor

What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Book, Writing, School

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.19, Hamilton Books

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.

Believe, Home, Writing

Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Schober Plath (1975). “Letters home: correspondence, 1950-1963”, HarperCollins Publishers

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.

Mother, Writing, Intelligent

Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.62, Hamilton Books

I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

Writing, Thinking, Knowing

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!

Writing, Laughing, Trying

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

Lying, Writing, Years

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.32, Anchor

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

Book, Writing, Angel

Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.286, Anchor

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

Girl, Baby, Writing

sylvia plath (1971). “the bell jar”

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Teenager, Writing, Long

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

Jobs, Real, Writing

I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing.

Writing, Vulnerable, Feels

Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.496, Faber & Faber

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