Top 500 Sylvia Plath Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

407. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “It never occurred to me to say no.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

425. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

427. “The box is only temporary.”

— Sylvia Plath

428. “Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.”

— Sylvia Plath

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

433. “But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”

— Sylvia Plath

434. “I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she’ll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.”

— Sylvia Plath

435. “I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man.”

— Sylvia Plath

436. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

— Sylvia Plath

437. “Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn’t breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.”

— Sylvia Plath

438. “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

439. “And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.”

— Sylvia Plath

440. “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

441. “A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.”

— Sylvia Plath

442. “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

443. “I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard’s study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye’s darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study.”

— Sylvia Plath

444. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

446. “I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.”

— Sylvia Plath

447. “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

448. “Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream.”

— Sylvia Plath

449. “The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water – as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.”

— Sylvia Plath

450. “My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.”

— Sylvia Plath