Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I am what I feel and think and do.”

— Sylvia Plath

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

158. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

160. “Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

173. “I have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, with her lion-red body, her wings of glass?”

— Sylvia Plath

174. “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

175. “Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

177. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

180. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

187. “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

189. “I collect men with interesting names.”

— Sylvia Plath

190. “I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”

— Sylvia Plath

191. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

193. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

195. “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

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196. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

198. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

200. “To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.”

— Sylvia Plath