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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

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What did my arms do before they held you?”

Sylvia Plath

&quot;Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices&quot; http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/3women.html (1962), a radio play published in 1968 <br class="br">Variant: What did my fingers do before they held him?<br>What did my heart do, with its love? <br class="br">Source: The Collected Poems

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

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

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

“Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I think I made you up inside my head.”

Sylvia Plath

“If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of 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

1950 entry, quoted in Kate Moses, &quot;The Real Sylvia Plath,&quot; Salon.com (2000-06-01) http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2000/06/01/plath2/ <br class="br">The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) <br class="br">Variant: If I didn&#x27;t think, I&#x27;d be much happier; if I didn&#x27;t have any sex organs, I wouldn&#x27;t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time. <br class="br">Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 7
Context: Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

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

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”

Sylvia Plath

“I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Variant: The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.
Source: The Bell Jar

“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”

Sylvia Plath

“I knew you'd decide to be all right again.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“Character is fate.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”

Sylvia Plath

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

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Collected Poems

“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Sylvia Plath

Variant: Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

“No day is safe from news of you.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

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

“I have stitched life into me like a rare organ”

Sylvia Plath

“I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Journals Of Sylvia Plath

“I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I used to pray to recover you.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“You smile.
No, it is not fatal.”

Sylvia Plath

“Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”

Sylvia Plath

“I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.”

Sylvia Plath

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost… but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

Sylvia Plath

“To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand.”

Sylvia Plath