Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath
Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

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

Sylvia Plath
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Sylvia Plath
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

Sylvia Plath
Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses
Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms.

Sylvia Plath
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

Sylvia Plath
I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

Sylvia Plath
I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

Sylvia Plath
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Sylvia Plath
I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study.

Sylvia Plath
Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

Sylvia Plath
Although this is the one man in the world for me, although I am using every fiber of my being to love him, even so, I am true to the essence of myself, and I know who that self is...

Sylvia Plath
The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.

Sylvia Plath
Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

Sylvia Plath
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole— A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Sylvia Plath
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

Sylvia Plath
What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Sylvia Plath