Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.”

— Sylvia Plath

452. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

— Sylvia Plath

453. “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

454. “A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.”

— Sylvia Plath

455. “It never occurred to me to say no.”

— Sylvia Plath

456. “As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can’t.”

— Sylvia Plath

457. “How many different deaths I can die?”

— Sylvia Plath

458. “The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water – as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.”

— Sylvia Plath

459. “I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she’ll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.”

— Sylvia Plath

460. “I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.”

— Sylvia Plath

461. “I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.”

— Sylvia Plath

462. “And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.”

— Sylvia Plath

463. “I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard’s study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye’s darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study.”

— Sylvia Plath

464. “Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream.”

— Sylvia Plath

465. “Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn’t breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.”

— Sylvia Plath

466. “Death may whiten in sun or out of it.”

— Sylvia Plath

467. “I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”

— Sylvia Plath

468. “To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.”

— Sylvia Plath

469. “You smile. No, it is not fatal.”

— Sylvia Plath

470. “I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”

— Sylvia Plath

471. “Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.”

— Sylvia Plath

472. “I want to be silverly beautiful.”

— Sylvia Plath

473. “It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.”

— Sylvia Plath

474. “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 that excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

— Sylvia Plath

475. “My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.”

— Sylvia Plath

476. “Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.”

— Sylvia Plath

477. “I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”

— Sylvia Plath

478. “The artist’s life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.”

— Sylvia Plath

479. “Though it’s quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.”

— Sylvia Plath

480. “Only the mouth-hole piped out, Importunate cricket In a quarry of silences. The people of the city heard it. They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate, The mouth-hole crying their locations. Drunk as a fetus I suck at the paps of darkness. The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away. The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry Open one stone eye. This is the after-hell: I see the light. A wind unstoppers the chamber.”

— Sylvia Plath

481. “Why is it that I find it so difficult to accept the present moment, whole as an apple, without cutting and hacking at it to find a purpose, or setting it up on a shelf with other apples to measure its worth or trying to pickle it in brine to preserve it, and crying to find it turns all brown and is no longer simply the lovely apple I was given in the morning?”

— Sylvia Plath

482. “I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.”

— Sylvia Plath

483. “People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly.”

— Sylvia Plath

484. “All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.”

— Sylvia Plath

485. “Jay Cee’s ugly as sin.”

— Sylvia Plath

486. “I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”

— Sylvia Plath

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487. “Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death – mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.”

— Sylvia Plath

488. “The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.”

— Sylvia Plath

489. “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”

— Sylvia Plath

490. “My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.”

— Sylvia Plath

491. “The faces were empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.”

— Sylvia Plath

492. “Something about the frank, guileless blue eyes, the beautiful young bodies, the brief scent of the dying flowers smote me like the clean quick cut of a knife. And the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.”

— Sylvia Plath

493. “It was a face that needed soap and water and Christian tolerance.”

— Sylvia Plath

494. “It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one.”

— Sylvia Plath

495. “I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”

— Sylvia Plath

496. “Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity.”

— Sylvia Plath

497. “God, who am I?”

— Sylvia Plath

498. “The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence.”

— Sylvia Plath

499. “I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that.”

— Sylvia Plath

500. “She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.”

— Sylvia Plath