Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?”

— Sylvia Plath

202. “I guess they call it suicide, but I’m to full to swallow my pride I can’t stand losing you The Police Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.”

— Sylvia Plath

203. “I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.”

— Sylvia Plath

204. “I am made, crudely, for success.”

— Sylvia Plath

205. “You know what lies are for.”

— Sylvia Plath

206. “And so I rehabilitate myself – staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction – than to lose it in slumber.”

— Sylvia Plath

207. “Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”

— Sylvia Plath

208. “If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say that I’d thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.”

— Sylvia Plath

209. “Your room is not your prison. You are.”

— Sylvia Plath

210. “So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something.”

— Sylvia Plath

211. “I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.”

— Sylvia Plath

212. “I justified the mess I made of life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it;.”

— Sylvia Plath

213. “And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.”

— Sylvia Plath

214. “Everything in life is writable...”

— Sylvia Plath

215. “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

216. “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

217. “I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.”

— Sylvia Plath

218. “What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind.”

— Sylvia Plath

219. “Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person.”

— Sylvia Plath

220. “Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

222. “Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self – - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.”

— Sylvia Plath

223. “I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”

— Sylvia Plath

224. “Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

— Sylvia Plath

225. “I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.”

— Sylvia Plath

226. “I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.”

— Sylvia Plath

227. “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

— Sylvia Plath

228. “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”

— Sylvia Plath

229. “An unfinished feeling.”

— Sylvia Plath

230. “I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.”

— Sylvia Plath

231. “I am alone in my room, between two worlds.”

— Sylvia Plath

232. “But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

— Sylvia Plath

233. “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”

— Sylvia Plath

234. “I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.”

— Sylvia Plath

235. “That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. “Save them for my funeral,” I’d said.”

— Sylvia Plath

236. “If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love.”

— Sylvia Plath

237. “A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief.”

— Sylvia Plath

238. “But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”

— Sylvia Plath

239. “I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

— Sylvia Plath

240. “And there’s the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.”

— Sylvia Plath

241. “Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.”

— Sylvia Plath

242. “I love the people,′ I said. ‘I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.”

— Sylvia Plath

243. “We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”

— Sylvia Plath

244. “Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

— Sylvia Plath

245. “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

246. “Don’t let the wicked city get you down.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

248. “I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

250. “Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man...”

— Sylvia Plath