Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

Sylvia Plath
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.

Sylvia Plath
We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

Sylvia Plath
I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love.

Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

Sylvia Plath
Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

Sylvia Plath
I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful.

Sylvia Plath
It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

Sylvia Plath
Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Sylvia Plath
I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.

Sylvia Plath
Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity.

Sylvia Plath
Sunday-the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors.

Sylvia Plath
It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Sylvia Plath
Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

Sylvia Plath
When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

Sylvia Plath
I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.

Sylvia Plath
We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

Sylvia Plath
As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

Sylvia Plath
And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machinelike dictatorship, be it of industry, state or organization, all their lives long.

Sylvia Plath
Every day one has to earn the name of 'writer' over again, with much wrestling.

Sylvia Plath
I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls.

Sylvia Plath
If every soldier refused to take arms... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.

Sylvia Plath
I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.

Sylvia Plath
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

Sylvia Plath
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

Sylvia Plath