Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

207. “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

208. “She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.”

— Sylvia Plath

209. “Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

212. “You know what lies are for.”

— Sylvia Plath

213. “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

214. “I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Reading Quotes

215. “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

216. “I suppose I’ll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.”

— Sylvia Plath

217. “And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.”

— Sylvia Plath

218. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

221. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

223. “I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.”

— Sylvia Plath

224. “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

225. “For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.”

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

228. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Winter Quotes

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

— Sylvia Plath

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

235. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

237. “I am both worse and better than you thought.”

— Sylvia Plath

238. “Something in me wants more. I can’t rest.”

— Sylvia Plath

239. “An unfinished feeling.”

— Sylvia Plath

240. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

244. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

246. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

249. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath