Sylvia Plath Quotes

“Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.”

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

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

Variant: I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 20

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes about love

“I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”

Source: Ariel

“I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.”

“I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the
world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?”

“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I like people too much or not at all.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes about people

“Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”

“I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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.”

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 2

“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath: Trending quotes

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

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 5

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.”

Variant: Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

"Lady Lazarus" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/lady.html Source: Ariel (1965)

Sylvia Plath Quotes

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”

Variant: How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this. I need someone to pour myself into.
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Variant: The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
Source: The Bell Jar

“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”

Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (December 1955), quoted in Joyce Carol Oates, "Raising Lady Lazarus," The New York Times (2000-11-05) http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/reviews/001105.05oatest.html The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) Variant: Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

“Is there no way out of the mind?”

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”

Variant: Is there no way out of the mind?

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (1950-02-19)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Variant: I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

“I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”

Source: Letters Home

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

Source: The Collected Poems

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”

Source: The Collected Poems

“I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.”

Source: The Bell Jar

“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”

Source: Ariel

“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”

"Elm" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/elm.html Source: Ariel (1965) Context: p>I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.</p

“I think I am mad sometimes.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.”

“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”

“I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.”

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

Source: The Bell Jar

“I wait and ache.”

“They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.”

Source: Ariel

“Opinions are like orgasms… mine matters most and I really don’t care if you have one.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”

Source: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

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

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”

"Mad Girl's Love Song" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/madgirl.html (1953) from Collected Poems (1981) Variant: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again. Source: The Bell Jar

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”

Variant: Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“How we need another soul to cling to.”

Draft of letter to Richard Sassoon (1956-03-01)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath