Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart – It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.”

— Sylvia Plath

252. “I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.”

— Sylvia Plath

253. “A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds...”

— Sylvia Plath

254. “The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”

— Sylvia Plath

255. “Over coffee and orange juice the embryonic suicide brightens visibly.”

— Sylvia Plath

256. “I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.”

— Sylvia Plath

257. “People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. From the poem “Sheep in Fog”, 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963.”

— Sylvia Plath

258. “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

259. “Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.”

— Sylvia Plath

260. “I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.”

— Sylvia Plath

261. “I’ll never speak to God again.”

— Sylvia Plath

262. “Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse.”

— Sylvia Plath

263. “I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”

— Sylvia Plath

264. “A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.”

— Sylvia Plath

265. “Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.”

— Sylvia Plath

266. “As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.”

— Sylvia Plath

267. “The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.”

— Sylvia Plath

268. “The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”

— Sylvia Plath

269. “I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.”

— Sylvia Plath

270. “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

271. “The future is what matters – because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present – like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.”

— Sylvia Plath

272. “In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.”

— Sylvia Plath

273. “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

274. “The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.”

— Sylvia Plath

275. “I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, ‘Ah!’ in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.”

— Sylvia Plath

276. “She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.”

— Sylvia Plath

277. “I wonder if art divorced from normal and conventional living is as vital as art combined with living: in a word, would marriage sap my creative energy and annihilate my desire for written and pictorial expression which increases with this depth of unsatisfied emotion... or would I achieve a fuller expression in art as well as in the creation of children?”

— Sylvia Plath

278. “I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.”

— Sylvia Plath

279. “I am sure there are things that can’t be cured by a good bath but I can’t think of one.”

— Sylvia Plath

280. “Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.”

— Sylvia Plath

281. “All through June the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.”

— Sylvia Plath

282. “I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.”

— Sylvia Plath

283. “If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.”

— Sylvia Plath

284. “That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.”

— Sylvia Plath

285. “I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”

— Sylvia Plath

286. “Is anyone anywhere happy?”

— Sylvia Plath

287. “I knew you’d decide to be all right again.”

— Sylvia Plath

288. “You’ve only got so long to live.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

290. “I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say “fine.”

— Sylvia Plath

291. “There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

293. “I can’t think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.”

— Sylvia Plath

294. “Tomorrow is another day toward death.”

— Sylvia Plath

295. “I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.”

— Sylvia Plath

296. “I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.”

— Sylvia Plath

297. “They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.”

— Sylvia Plath

298. “O heart, such disorganization!”

— Sylvia Plath

299. “Our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.”

— Sylvia Plath

300. “The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of my vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.”

— Sylvia Plath