Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I hurl my heart to halt his pace.”

— Sylvia Plath

103. “I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn’t speak.”

— Sylvia Plath

104. “Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.”

— Sylvia Plath

105. “Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.”

— Sylvia Plath

106. “What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?”

— Sylvia Plath

107. “Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.”

— Sylvia Plath

108. “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”

— Sylvia Plath

109. “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

110. “There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.”

— Sylvia Plath

111. “There was a beautiful time...”

— Sylvia Plath

112. “Widow. The word consumes itself.”

— Sylvia Plath

113. “I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”

— Sylvia Plath

114. “I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.”

— Sylvia Plath

115. “Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant – but this is no indication of the true worth of one’s total human identity: past, present and future!”

— Sylvia Plath

116. “Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.”

— Sylvia Plath

117. “Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.”

— Sylvia Plath

118. “If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.”

— Sylvia Plath

119. “Not easy to state the change you made. If I’m alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

— Sylvia Plath

120. “It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

— Sylvia Plath

121. “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. 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.”

— Sylvia Plath

122. “See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.”

— Sylvia Plath

123. “I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”

— Sylvia Plath

124. “God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.”

— Sylvia Plath

125. “There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.”

— Sylvia Plath

126. “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.”

— Sylvia Plath

127. “I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.”

— Sylvia Plath

128. “I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful.”

— Sylvia Plath

129. “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

130. “Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”

— Sylvia Plath

131. “They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.”

— Sylvia Plath

132. “I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”

— Sylvia Plath

133. “How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought.”

— Sylvia Plath

134. “I deserve that, don’t I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with.”

— Sylvia Plath

135. “If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if I didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

137. “I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.”

— Sylvia Plath

138. “Ash, ash – – You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there – – A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.”

— Sylvia Plath

139. “Every day one has to earn the name of ‘writer’ over again, with much wrestling.”

— Sylvia Plath

140. “Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image.”

— Sylvia Plath

141. “Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.”

— Sylvia Plath

142. “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.”

— Sylvia Plath

143. “I am what I feel and think and do.”

— Sylvia Plath

144. “I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

— Sylvia Plath

145. “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.”

— Sylvia Plath

146. “Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?”

— Sylvia Plath

147. “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

148. “I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn’t night and it wasn’t day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.”

— Sylvia Plath

149. “I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.”

— Sylvia Plath

150. “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