Sylvia Plath Quotes

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

~ Sylvia Plath

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

~ Sylvia Plath

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

~ 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

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

~ Sylvia Plath

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

~ Sylvia Plath

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.

~ Sylvia Plath

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen.

~ Sylvia Plath

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.

~ Sylvia Plath

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.

~ Sylvia Plath

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

~ Sylvia Plath

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

~ Sylvia Plath

Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.

~ Sylvia Plath

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

~ Sylvia Plath

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

~ Sylvia Plath

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

~ Sylvia Plath

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

~ Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

~ Sylvia Plath

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

~ Sylvia Plath

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

~ Sylvia Plath

What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

~ Sylvia Plath