Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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 the throat and I’d cry for a week.”

— Sylvia Plath

52. “The abstract kills, the concrete saves.”

— Sylvia Plath

53. “Not being perfect hurts.”

— Sylvia Plath

54. “I have stitched life into me like a rare organ.”

— Sylvia Plath

55. “So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.”

— Sylvia Plath

56. “Dying is an art. Like everything else, I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call.”

— Sylvia Plath

57. “Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”

— Sylvia Plath

58. “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”

— Sylvia Plath

59. “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

60. “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”

— Sylvia Plath

61. “Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.”

— Sylvia Plath

62. “Mother of otherness, Eat me.”

— Sylvia Plath

63. “I like people too much or not at all.”

— Sylvia Plath

64. “I am I-I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I.”

— Sylvia Plath

65. “The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”

— Sylvia Plath

66. “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

67. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

— Sylvia Plath

68. “I am myself. That is not enough.”

— Sylvia Plath

69. “What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.”

— Sylvia Plath

70. “I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.”

— Sylvia Plath

71. “Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.”

— Sylvia Plath

72. “I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.”

— Sylvia Plath

73. “I am not cruel, only truthful.”

— Sylvia Plath

74. “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

75. “Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.”

— Sylvia Plath

76. “There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.”

— Sylvia Plath

77. “It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.”

— Sylvia Plath

78. “If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

— Sylvia Plath

79. “I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”

— Sylvia Plath

80. “It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.”

— Sylvia Plath

81. “Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God.”

— Sylvia Plath

82. “If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.”

— Sylvia Plath

83. “I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on top of the beer can.”

— Sylvia Plath

84. “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

— Sylvia Plath

85. “Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”

— Sylvia Plath

86. “I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.”

— Sylvia Plath

87. “The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.”

— Sylvia Plath

88. “Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?”

— Sylvia Plath

89. “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

90. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”

— Sylvia Plath

91. “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

92. “What did my arms do before they held you?”

— Sylvia Plath

93. “Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak.”

— Sylvia Plath

94. “I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”

— Sylvia Plath

95. “And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.”

— Sylvia Plath

96. “Like a cat I have nine times to die.”

— Sylvia Plath

97. “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

— Sylvia Plath

98. “And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.”

— Sylvia Plath

99. “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

100. “Character is fate.”

— Sylvia Plath