Sylvia Plath Quotes

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

~ Sylvia Plath

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned upand be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)

~ Sylvia Plath

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. 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. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

~ 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 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

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming Traitor, sinner, imposter.

~ Sylvia Plath

Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

~ Sylvia Plath

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

~ Sylvia Plath

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who 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

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

~ Sylvia Plath

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

~ Sylvia Plath

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

~ Sylvia Plath

How we need another soul to cling to.

~ 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

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. 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. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

~ Sylvia Plath

Then I thought, No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

~ Sylvia Plath

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

~ Sylvia Plath

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy of poppies.But when it came right down to it, the sink of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

~ Sylvia Plath

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face.But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots.The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window.

~ Sylvia Plath

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

~ Sylvia Plath

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

~ Sylvia Plath

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

~ 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

Writing sharpens life, life enriches writing.

~ Sylvia Plath

If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done.

~ Sylvia Plath

I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

~ Sylvia Plath

I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.

~ Sylvia Plath

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

~ Sylvia Plath

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

~ Sylvia Plath

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

~ Sylvia Plath

The tongues of hell are dull.

~ Sylvia Plath

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

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

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