Sylvia Plath Quotes

I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up min...

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting...

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed ove...

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against ...

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a f...

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, ...

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 don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What d...

The worst enemy to creativity is self doubt

Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college,...

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thi...

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become a...

I have a visual imagination.

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... secu...

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and ...

Fixed stars govern a life

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience poss...

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, crea...

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.It would mean getting up at s...

There was a beautiful time...

Unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long.

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I craw...

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off fro...

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...

This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure...

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy...

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a...

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

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I ...

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a gr...

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

I’ll never speak to God again.

Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of...

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To re...

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

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows fr...

I am not cruel —only truthful.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as th...

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour...

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a s...

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

Poppies in JulyLittle poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?You flicker. I cannot touch you....

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylu...

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars ...

Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye an...

Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when...

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too fu...

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

What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't ha...

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to b...

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woma...

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

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is li...

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five...

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated...

The tongues of hell are dull.

LoreleiIt is no night to drown in:A full moon, river lapsingBlack beneath bland mirror-sheen,The blu...

EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross ...

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have ...

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the so...

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillus...

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; y...

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass s...

I fancied you'd return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad ...

Nick and the CandlestickI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tearsT...

The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.

Dying is an art.Like everything else,I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.I do i...

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.

DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty yea...

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags th...

Is it the sea you hear in me,Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill,...

LADY LAZARUSI have done it again.One year in every tenI manage it--A sort of walking miracle, my ski...

They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.--From the poem "Lady Lazarus"...

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue

The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.

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

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its m...

This is a case without a body.The body does not come into it at all.

All the gods know is destinations.

Stars open among the lilies.Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?This is the silence of...

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding qui...

I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with...