Sylvia Plath Quotes

355 Sourced Quotes

Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

Sylvia Plath
But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

Sylvia Plath
A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Sylvia Plath
Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.

Sylvia Plath
It is a terrible thing
To be so open: it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

Sylvia Plath
My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.
Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.
While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and tart,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart.

Sylvia Plath
If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit.

Sylvia Plath
I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.

Sylvia Plath
I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

Sylvia Plath
One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

Sylvia Plath
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

Sylvia Plath
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Sylvia Plath
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

Sylvia Plath
In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

Sylvia Plath
Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady... I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?

Sylvia Plath
I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

Sylvia Plath
And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness

Sylvia Plath
The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

Sylvia Plath
The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Sylvia Plath
It's incredible to think that carpets can create a state of mind, but I am so suggestible to colors and textures that I'm sure a red carpet would keep me forever optimistic.

Sylvia Plath
I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

Sylvia Plath
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

Sylvia Plath
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Sylvia Plath
They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Sylvia Plath
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

Sylvia Plath
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
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 need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak.

Sylvia Plath
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

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