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

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

— Sylvia Plath

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

410. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

416. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

419. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

421. “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

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.”

— Sylvia Plath

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

433. “The box is only temporary.”

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

442. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

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

— Sylvia Plath

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Sylvia Plath

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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