Sylvia Plath - Journals of Sylvia Plath

140 Sourced Quotes

View all Sylvia Plath Quotes

* To learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * To despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * To yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.

Sylvia Plath

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

Sylvia Plath

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good.

Sylvia Plath

Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting.

Sylvia Plath

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

Sylvia Plath

It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

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 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

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

Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

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

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

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