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Sylvia Plath Quotes
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Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Boston, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they lived together in the United States and then in England. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962.

Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy . She committed suicide in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, and The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems.

✵ 27. October 1932 – 11. February 1963  •  Other names سیلویا پلات
Sylvia Plath photo
Sylvia Plath: 342 quotes249 likes

Sylvia Plath Quotes

“The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

“I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“There was a beautiful time…”

Sylvia Plath

“My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“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 book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7

“I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

--From the poem "Elm", written 19 April 1962”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I am myself. That is not enough.”

Sylvia Plath

“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

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“How many different deaths I can die?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“… it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you're feeling like hell and expect you to say "fine”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Not being perfect hurts.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I don't know how long I kept at it…
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“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

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

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.”

Sylvia Plath

“…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Talking about my fears to others feeds it.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Worse even
than your maddening
song, your silence." -”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Tomorrow is another day toward death.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.”

Sylvia Plath

“I wondered what I thought I was burying.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“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 book The Bell Jar

Variant: 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.
Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 8

“Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.”

Sylvia Plath

1950 entry, quoted in Gayle Wurst, Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (1999), p. 158
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

“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

1950-07-08
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

“I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

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

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

&quot;The Moon and the Yew Tree&quot; http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/yew.html <br class="br">Ariel (1965)

“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 book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7

“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

Letter to Aurelia Plath (August 21, 1962)
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950&ndash;1963 (1976)