Sylvia Plath famous quotes

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Thinking

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

#Ideas #Age #Feminism

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

#Life #Sad #Creativity

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Expectations #Feminism #Classic

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

#Trying #Different #Becoming

Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Girl #Sex #Kindness

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Heartbreak #Home #Long

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Book #Famous Inspirational #Skills

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Chaos #Cold #Kind

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Eye #Air #Jars

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Sadness #Mad #Choices

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Love #Dream #Cutting

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Dark #Long #Soul

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

#Laughing #Waiting #Sides

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Desire #Feminism #Classic

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Moving #Eye #Feminism

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Encouraging #Rejection #Trying

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Self #Hurtful #Together

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Kissing #Feminism #Important

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Jealous #Writing #Thinking

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Giving #Soul #Body

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Jobs #Satisfied

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Love Life #Color

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

#Inspirational #Sad #Women

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Arrows #July #Rockets

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
-- Sylvia Plath

#Girl #Sleep #Night

How we need another soul to cling to.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Loneliness #Soul #Needs

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Friendship #Inspiring #Funny Best Friend

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

#Roots #Do Not Fear #Bottom

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.
-- Sylvia Plath

The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Regret #Past #Hardest

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Life #Despair #Feminism

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

#Depression #Taken #Eye

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

Don't let the wicked city get you down.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Cities #Wicked

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Depression #Silence #Feminism

Opinions are like orgasms...mine matters most and I really don't care if you have one.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Care #Matter #Opinion

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.
-- Sylvia Plath

#World #Sickness #Victim

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Song #Silence

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Life #Home #Writing

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Beautiful #Moon #Impression

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

#Flower #Tree #Mind

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Sleep #Years #White

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Unique #Moon #Light

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...
-- Sylvia Plath

#Happiness #Sweet #Tired

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Friendship #Air #Should

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Fall #Comforting #Fallen

I am what I feel and think and do.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Thinking #Feels

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Life #Tired #Sleep

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Knives #Sky #White

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Wish #Exit

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Mother #Thinking #Too Much

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Skulls #Yesterday #Slime

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still
-- Sylvia Plath

#Writing #Voice #Stills

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Summer #Fall #Rain

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it
-- Sylvia Plath

#Lying #Love Is #Shadow

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Beautiful #Shadow #World

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Thinking #People #Raw Materials

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Truth Love

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Beautiful #Sleep #Tree

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Identity #Ache #Faceless

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Eye #Silence #Negative

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Darkness #Cracks

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Spring #Eye #World

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Crazy #Light #Opposites

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Unique #Delight #Strange

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Jobs #Writing #Expression

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.
-- Sylvia Plath

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Time Of My Life

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Depression #Air #Paris

Is there no way out of the mind?
-- Sylvia Plath

#Mind #Feminism #Way

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Life #Memories #Taken

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

#Girl #People #Strange

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Soul #Feminism #Flesh

The box is only temporary.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Boxes #Temporary

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Success #Writing #Stink

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Stupid #People #Dull

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Living My Life

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Fake People #Women #Independent

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

#Running #Queens #Ambition

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists
-- Sylvia Plath

#Thinking #Important #Needs

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Powerful #Thinking #Lasts

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Truth #White #Blue

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Pain #Taken #Bye

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person
-- Sylvia Plath

#Mean #Winter #Simple

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Unrequited Love #Heart #Giving

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Lying #Writing #Years

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Girl #Being Different #Important

I am myself. That is not enough.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Chaos #Conformity #Enough

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Art #Crazy #Mad

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Children #Perfection #Terrible

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

#Pain #Thinking #Understanding

There is more than one good way to drown.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Way

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Girl #Thinking #Cooking

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Bell Jar #Said #Wanted

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?
-- Sylvia Plath

#Missing #Grass #Solitary

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

#Trying #Honest #Being Honest

I think I made you up inside my head.
-- Sylvia Plath

#Thinking #Made

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

#Numbers #Mad #People