Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

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

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

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

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