Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

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

Sylvia Plath
How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

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.

Sylvia Plath
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

Sylvia Plath
I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

Sylvia Plath
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Sylvia Plath
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

Sylvia Plath
Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms.

Sylvia Plath
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

Sylvia Plath
I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

Sylvia Plath
I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

Sylvia Plath
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Sylvia Plath
I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study.

Sylvia Plath
Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

Sylvia Plath
Although this is the one man in the world for me, although I am using every fiber of my being to love him, even so, I am true to the essence of myself, and I know who that self is...

Sylvia Plath
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.

Sylvia Plath
Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

Sylvia Plath
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole— A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Sylvia Plath
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

Sylvia Plath
What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Sylvia Plath
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

Sylvia Plath
But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

Sylvia Plath
A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Sylvia Plath
Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

Sylvia Plath
It is a terrible thing
To be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

Sylvia Plath
The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Sylvia Plath
I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

Sylvia Plath
It's incredible to think that carpets can create a state of mind, but I am so suggestible to colors and textures that I'm sure a red carpet would keep me forever optimistic.

Sylvia Plath
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

Sylvia Plath