Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.”

— Sylvia Plath

302. “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

303. “Tomorrow is another day toward death.”

— Sylvia Plath

304. “I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.”

— Sylvia Plath

305. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

307. “O heart, such disorganization!”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

309. “The future is what matters because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present.”

— Sylvia Plath

310. “Love Is a Parallax.”

— Sylvia Plath

311. “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

312. “From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence.”

— Sylvia Plath

313. “I am an observer.”

— Sylvia Plath

314. “What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that “shaping” force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning.”

— Sylvia Plath

315. “Nothing. Nothing but a great, amiable boredom.”

— Sylvia Plath

316. “New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.”

— Sylvia Plath

317. “The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

318. “Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal.”

— Sylvia Plath

319. “I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware.”

— Sylvia Plath

320. “Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness...”

— Sylvia Plath

321. “In March I’ll be rested, caught up and human.”

— Sylvia Plath

322. “I’m not afraid of being lost. We all wander off from time to time. It’s the fear of never quite finding myself that keeps me up at night.”

— Sylvia Plath

323. “I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.”

— Sylvia Plath

324. “Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?”

— Sylvia Plath

325. “Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won’t notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.”

— Sylvia Plath

326. “I’ve eaten a bag of Green apples. Boarded the train, there’s no getting off.”

— Sylvia Plath

327. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”

— Sylvia Plath

328. “Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.”

— Sylvia Plath

329. “I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.”

— Sylvia Plath

330. “All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

— Sylvia Plath

331. “I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.”

— Sylvia Plath

332. “But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it.”

— Sylvia Plath

333. “I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a dayspare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.”

— Sylvia Plath

334. “Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me.”

— Sylvia Plath

335. “Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isn’t just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get married. If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn’t I expect it in a man?”

— Sylvia Plath

336. “I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.”

— Sylvia Plath

337. “Wind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.”

— Sylvia Plath

338. “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead – after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.”

— Sylvia Plath

339. “What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?”

— Sylvia Plath

340. “What the hell is tragedy? I am.”

— Sylvia Plath

341. “Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses.”

— Sylvia Plath

342. “The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.”

— Sylvia Plath

343. “I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.”

— Sylvia Plath

344. “The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole – A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.”

— Sylvia Plath

345. “The day I went into physics class it was death.”

— Sylvia Plath

346. “A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.”

— Sylvia Plath

347. “I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.”

— Sylvia Plath

348. “Although, I admit, I desire, Occasionally, some backtalk From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain: A certain minor light may still Lean incandescent Out of kitchen table or chair As if a celestial burning took Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then –.”

— Sylvia Plath

349. “Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”

— Sylvia Plath

350. “A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.”

— Sylvia Plath

Featured in: Firsts Quotes