Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Creativity Quotes

2. “Is there no way out of the mind?”

— Sylvia Plath

3. “If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”

— Sylvia Plath

4. “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

Featured in: Creativity Quotes

5. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

— Sylvia Plath

6. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

— Sylvia Plath

7. “I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”

— Sylvia Plath

8. “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

9. “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

12. “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

13. “How we need another soul to cling to.”

— Sylvia Plath

14. “Ready for a new life.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Rain Quotes, Summer Quotes

16. “After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.”

— Sylvia Plath

17. “I dream too much, work too little.”

— Sylvia Plath

18. “I think I made you up inside my head.”

— Sylvia Plath

19. “Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”

— Sylvia Plath

20. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”

— Sylvia Plath

21. “Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.”

— Sylvia Plath

22. “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”

— Sylvia Plath

23. “I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”

— Sylvia Plath

24. “Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”

— Sylvia Plath

25. “It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.”

— Sylvia Plath

26. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”

— Sylvia Plath

27. “I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”

— Sylvia Plath

28. “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

29. “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”

— Sylvia Plath

30. “I think I am mad sometimes.”

— Sylvia Plath

31. “I’d say go to hell, but I never want to see you again.”

— Sylvia Plath

32. “I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still.”

— Sylvia Plath

33. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”

— Sylvia Plath

34. “Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.”

— Sylvia Plath

35. “If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.”

— Sylvia Plath

36. “I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

— Sylvia Plath

37. “You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

39. “I woke to the sound of rain.”

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Rain Quotes

40. “Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.”

— Sylvia Plath

41. “All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.”

— Sylvia Plath

42. “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

43. “I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am.”

— Sylvia Plath

44. “Slowly, slowly, catch the monkey.”

— Sylvia Plath

45. “I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

— Sylvia Plath

46. “The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”

— Sylvia Plath

47. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.””

— Sylvia Plath

48. “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”

— Sylvia Plath

49. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

50. “Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.”

— Sylvia Plath