Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

"Does she know you love her?" "Of course." I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. "If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday."

Sylvia Plath
Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.

Sylvia Plath
I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured...with an informed and intelligent mind.

Sylvia Plath
The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.

Sylvia Plath
Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

Sylvia Plath
It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

Sylvia Plath
Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

Sylvia Plath
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.

Sylvia Plath
Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal.

Sylvia Plath
On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.

Sylvia Plath
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."

Sylvia Plath
That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

Sylvia Plath
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

Sylvia Plath
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.

Sylvia Plath
So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

Sylvia Plath
I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.

Sylvia Plath
I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Sylvia Plath
I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence...luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged.

Sylvia Plath
What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.

Sylvia Plath
Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

Sylvia Plath
I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with.

Sylvia Plath
The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

Sylvia Plath
I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!

Sylvia Plath
Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending.

Sylvia Plath
Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man...

Sylvia Plath
The terrible wind tries his breathing. The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

Sylvia Plath
In spite of everything, I still have my good old sense of humor.

Sylvia Plath
I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.

Sylvia Plath
I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Sylvia Plath
My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

Sylvia Plath