Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if when it passed out of sight, I might have the good luck to pass with it.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

406. “I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.”

— Sylvia Plath

407. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

409. “A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.”

— Sylvia Plath

410. “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

411. “I am learning how to compromise the wild dream ideals and the necessary realities without such screaming pain.”

— Sylvia Plath

412. “I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.”

— Sylvia Plath

413. “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

414. “A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.”

— Sylvia Plath

415. “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

— Sylvia Plath

416. “The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”

— Sylvia Plath

417. “I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain.”

— Sylvia Plath

418. “Always him. Damn, what is the matter with me? Is it because I want somebody to orient myself about that I’m drawn to him, or am I drawn to him because he is exactly the sort of person I want to orient myself about?”

— Sylvia Plath

419. “We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

421. “What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit’s cry may be wilder But it has no soul.”

— Sylvia Plath

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422. “Then bed, and again the luxury of dark. Still the blood and flesh of me were electric and singing quietly. But it ebbed and ebbed and dark and sleep and oblivion came and came, surging, surging, surging inward, lapping and drowning with no-name, no-identity, none at all. Just nothing, yet the seeds of awakening and life slumbered there in the dark.”

— Sylvia Plath

423. “It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”

— Sylvia Plath

424. “I hadn’t, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.”

— Sylvia Plath

425. “I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.”

— Sylvia Plath

426. “You fool – you are afraid of being alone with you own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. Your room is not your prison. You are.”

— Sylvia Plath

427. “I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”

— Sylvia Plath

428. “It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter anymore. And yet I cannot let it go. I cannot let it go.”

— Sylvia Plath

429. “I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.”

— Sylvia Plath

430. “I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.”

— Sylvia Plath

431. “Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser.”

— Sylvia Plath

432. “I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything.”

— Sylvia Plath

433. “I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off.”

— Sylvia Plath

434. “I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!”

— Sylvia Plath

435. “People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.”

— Sylvia Plath

436. “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me; all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?”

— Sylvia Plath

437. “At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there were no windows.”

— Sylvia Plath

438. “I am too pure for you or anyone.”

— Sylvia Plath

439. “You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.”

— Sylvia Plath

440. “Endure, endure, and the syllables harden like stoic white sheets struck with rigor mortis on the clothesline of winter.”

— Sylvia Plath

441. “It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.”

— Sylvia Plath

442. “Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.”

— Sylvia Plath

443. “I’ve got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it’s too late. But writing poems and letters doesn’t seem to do much good.”

— Sylvia Plath

444. “Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry.”

— Sylvia Plath

445. “A small, answering point in my own body flew towards it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

— Sylvia Plath

446. “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.”

— Sylvia Plath

447. “When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.”

— Sylvia Plath

448. “Masks are the order of the day – and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.”

— Sylvia Plath

449. “The box is only temporary.”

— Sylvia Plath

450. “It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.”

— Sylvia Plath