Sylvia Plath quotes

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer, renowned for her confessional style. Her works explore themes of identity, mental illness, and the struggles faced by women. She became an influential literary figure and a symbol of emotional honesty in modern literature. Here are 354 of her quotes:

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Sylvia Plath

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

Sylvia Plath

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Sylvia Plath

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Sylvia Plath

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Sylvia Plath

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.

Sylvia Plath

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it.

Sylvia Plath

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Sylvia Plath

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.

Sylvia Plath

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

How did I know that someday - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

Sylvia Plath

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

Sylvia Plath

Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation - he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing - I have Ted, will have children - but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.

Sylvia Plath

What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

Sylvia Plath

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?

Sylvia Plath

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

Sylvia Plath