Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”

— Sylvia Plath

152. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

157. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

160. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

164. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

166. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

176. “I collect men with interesting names.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

178. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

184. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

198. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath