Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.”

— Sylvia Plath

152. “The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.”

— Sylvia Plath

153. “Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.”

— Sylvia Plath

154. “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”

— Sylvia Plath

155. “I ride earth’s burning carousel. Day in, day out.”

— Sylvia Plath

156. “Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen.”

— Sylvia Plath

157. “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”

— Sylvia Plath

158. “Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.”

— Sylvia Plath

159. “I do not fear it: I have been there.”

— Sylvia Plath

160. “And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.”

— Sylvia Plath

161. “There is more than one good way to drown.”

— Sylvia Plath

162. “At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

164. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”

— Sylvia Plath

165. “I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can’t be attacked.”

— Sylvia Plath

166. “The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”

— Sylvia Plath

167. “If they substituted the word ‘Lust’ for ‘Love’ in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.”

— Sylvia Plath

168. “The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.”

— Sylvia Plath

169. “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

— Sylvia Plath

170. “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

— Sylvia Plath

171. “The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.”

— Sylvia Plath

172. “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.”

— Sylvia Plath

173. “I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.”

— Sylvia Plath

174. “The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.”

— Sylvia Plath

175. “Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. – From the poem “Doom of the Exiles”, written 16 April 1954.”

— Sylvia Plath

176. “I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.”

— Sylvia Plath

177. “The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm.”

— Sylvia Plath

178. “I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.”

— Sylvia Plath

179. “If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.”

— Sylvia Plath

180. “I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.”

— Sylvia Plath

181. “My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.”

— Sylvia Plath

182. “You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”

— Sylvia Plath

183. “I collect men with interesting names.”

— Sylvia Plath

184. “I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself “the girl who wanted to be God.” Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.”

— Sylvia Plath

185. “The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.”

— Sylvia Plath

186. “Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.”

— Sylvia Plath

187. “How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”

— Sylvia Plath

188. “You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.”

— Sylvia Plath

189. “I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”

— Sylvia Plath

190. “A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.”

— Sylvia Plath

191. “Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

193. “The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.”

— Sylvia Plath

194. “It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

— Sylvia Plath

195. “It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.”

— Sylvia Plath

196. “So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”

— Sylvia Plath

197. “No, I won’t try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter ‘Did you have a nice vacation?’ ‘Oh, yes, and you?’ I’ll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”

— Sylvia Plath

198. “Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.”

— Sylvia Plath

199. “I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.”

— Sylvia Plath

200. “Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.”

— Sylvia Plath