Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.”

— Sylvia Plath

352. “I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.”

— Sylvia Plath

353. “She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”

— Sylvia Plath

354. “Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play “Goodbye My Fancy,” of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself.”

— Sylvia Plath

355. “God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?”

— Sylvia Plath

356. “I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.”

— Sylvia Plath

357. “Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses.”

— Sylvia Plath

358. “To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”

— Sylvia Plath

359. “The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”

— Sylvia Plath

360. “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.”

— Sylvia Plath

361. “There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

— Sylvia Plath

362. “I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I’m so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.”

— Sylvia Plath

363. “I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”

— Sylvia Plath

364. “I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists.”

— Sylvia Plath

365. “Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen physical or psychological wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.”

— Sylvia Plath

366. “The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.”

— Sylvia Plath

367. “I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people’s minds and souls.”

— Sylvia Plath

368. “I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love.”

— Sylvia Plath

369. “There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice – patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”

— Sylvia Plath

370. “I’m sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I’m still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt.”

— Sylvia Plath

371. “A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”

— Sylvia Plath

372. “The eyes and the faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”

— Sylvia Plath

373. “I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.”

— Sylvia Plath

374. “When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.”

— Sylvia Plath

375. “A stiff breeze lifted the hair from my head. At my feet, the city doused its lights in sleep, its buildings blackened, as if for a funeral.”

— Sylvia Plath

376. “Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?”

— Sylvia Plath

377. “I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

— Sylvia Plath

378. “And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machinelike dictatorship, be it of industry, state or organization, all their lives long.”

— Sylvia Plath

379. “Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending.”

— Sylvia Plath

380. “I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”

— Sylvia Plath

381. “As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.”

— Sylvia Plath

382. “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.”

— Sylvia Plath

383. “God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.”

— Sylvia Plath

384. “No day is safe from news of you.”

— Sylvia Plath

385. “Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.”

— Sylvia Plath

386. “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.”

— Sylvia Plath

387. “I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe. I’d come home, and if I looked closely into the mirror I’d be able to make out a little white Alp at the back of my eye. Now I thought that if I looked closely into the mirror I’d see a doll-size Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at me.”

— Sylvia Plath

388. “You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

390. “If there’s anything I look down on, it’s a man in a blue outfit.”

— Sylvia Plath

391. “I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”

— Sylvia Plath

392. “I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”

— Sylvia Plath

393. “Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”

— Sylvia Plath

394. “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”

— Sylvia Plath

395. “So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead...”

— Sylvia Plath

396. “I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

— Sylvia Plath

397. “Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.”

— Sylvia Plath

398. “The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.”

— Sylvia Plath

399. “I must learn more about these people – try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.”

— Sylvia Plath

400. “I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.”

— Sylvia Plath