Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

Sylvia Plath
I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much.

Sylvia Plath
Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.

Sylvia Plath
Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

Sylvia Plath
Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

Sylvia Plath
Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within.

Sylvia Plath
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Sylvia Plath
The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

Sylvia Plath
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Sylvia Plath
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

Sylvia Plath
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You —

Sylvia Plath
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.

Sylvia Plath
I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

Sylvia Plath
I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Sylvia Plath
I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

Sylvia Plath
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

Sylvia Plath
It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn't matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

Sylvia Plath
I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.

Sylvia Plath
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

Sylvia Plath
How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

Sylvia Plath
If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

Sylvia Plath
I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

Sylvia Plath
Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

Sylvia Plath
I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

Sylvia Plath
I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead — after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.

Sylvia Plath
A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

Sylvia Plath
I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more

Sylvia Plath
What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.

Sylvia Plath
Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.

Sylvia Plath
Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy & peaceful.

Sylvia Plath