Top 55 Sylvia Plath Quotes and Sayings
Read some heartbreaking and beautiful Sylvia Plath quotes from the writer herself. American poet Sylvia Plath is best known for The Bell Jar and her collections of poetry – The Colossus and Ariel.
Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous Sylvia Plath quotes.
“When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” – Sylvia Plath
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath
“I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” – Sylvia Plath
“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” – Sylvia Plath
“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.” – Sylvia Plath
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” – Sylvia Plath
“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
“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” – Sylvia Plath
“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. And I am horribly limited.” – 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
“Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?” – Sylvia Plath
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” – Sylvia Plath
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” – Sylvia Plath
“I talk to God but the sky is empty.” – Sylvia Plath
“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” – Sylvia Plath
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.” – Sylvia Plath
“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.” – Sylvia Plath
“You have to be able to make a real creative life for yourself, before you can expect anyone else to provide one ready-made for you.” – Sylvia Plath
“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.” – Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.” – Sylvia Plath
“The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.” – Sylvia Plath
“I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am.” – Sylvia Plath
“Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?” – Sylvia Plath
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” – Sylvia Plath
“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.” – 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 too want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.” – Sylvia Plath
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.” – Sylvia Plath
“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.” – Sylvia Plath
“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.” – Sylvia Plath
“And by the way, everything in life is writeable if you have the outgoing guts to do it. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath
“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.” – Sylvia Plath
“I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” – 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.” – Sylvia Plath
“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.” – Sylvia Plath
“And there’s the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.” – Sylvia Plath
“I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” – Sylvia Plath
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.” – Sylvia Plath
“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
“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.” – Sylvia Plath
“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.” – Sylvia Plath
“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. 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
“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.” – Sylvia Plath
“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
“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.” – Sylvia Plath
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…” – Sylvia Plath
“I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. 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 my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” – Sylvia Plath
“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. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction–every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.” – Sylvia Plath
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. 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
I hope you enjoy this Sylvia Plath quotes collection.
