Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

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

Sylvia Plath
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.

Sylvia Plath
There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.

Sylvia Plath
God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

Sylvia Plath
What a thrill —
My thumb instead of an onion.

Sylvia Plath
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

Sylvia Plath
I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

Sylvia Plath
To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

Sylvia Plath
The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

Sylvia Plath
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Sylvia Plath
What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.

Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Sylvia Plath
I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.

Sylvia Plath
I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.

Sylvia Plath
How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

Sylvia Plath
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.

Sylvia Plath
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.

Sylvia Plath
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.

Sylvia Plath
Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Sylvia Plath
When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

Sylvia Plath
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Sylvia Plath
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.

Sylvia Plath
Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

Sylvia Plath
You looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.

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

Sylvia Plath
In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

Sylvia Plath
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

Sylvia Plath
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

Sylvia Plath
Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.

Sylvia Plath