Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath
I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

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
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