If you’re looking for some of the most inspirational Sylvia Plath quotes to help you appreciate yourself and your emotions a little more, then this collection is for you!
Sylvia Plath chose poetry as a career over other fields.
Being diagnosed with depression, she used her intelligent and clever mind to express her thoughts and discover her mind through poetry.
Her poetry is the epitome of honesty, showing the world about the pain she experienced.
If you are experiencing the darkest day of your life or just want some little bits of inspiration, then these quotes we’ve gathered might help you get through with it and to have enough strength to pursue life!
Add this to your must-read list today.
Check the full collection here.
And make sure to read these Pablo Neruda quotes.
Best Sylvia Plath Quotes
1. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
2. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
3. “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.”
4. “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.”
5. “But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”
6. “Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
7. “Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”
8. “Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.”
9. “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
10. “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
11. “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.”
12. “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
13. “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 have a call.”
14. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”
Famous Sylvia Plath Quotes
15. “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
16. “I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
17. “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.”
18. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about, if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.”
19. “I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
20. “Is there no way out of the mind?”
21. “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
22. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.”
23. “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.”
24. “I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth. The meek get ignored and trampled.”
25. “I have stitched life into me like a rare organ.”
26. “If I tried to describe my personality, I’d start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and believing in magic for years and years.”
27. “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?”
28. “My world falls apart, crumbles. ‘The centre cannot hold.’ There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation.”
29. “Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”
Inspirational Sylvia Plath Quotes
30. “The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
31. “Of course, I didn’t believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn’t have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.”
32. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
33. “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
34. “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.”
35. “That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle, beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.”
36. “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
37. “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.”
38. “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.”
39. “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless, well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
40. “Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god, where are you? I want you, need you. The belief in you and love and mankind.”
41. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
42. “Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”
43. “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
44. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes About Writing
45. “Writing, then, was a substitute for myself. If you don’t love me, love my writing and love me for my writing. It is also much more, a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”
46. “Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.”
47. “I write only because there is a voice within me, that will not be still.”
48. “Arrogant, I think, I have written lines which qualify me to be ‘The Poetess of America’ as Ted will be ‘The Poet of England’ and her dominions.”
49. “Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over-dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.”
50. “The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”
51. “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?”
52. “I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered.”
53. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”
54. “I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.”
55. “Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.”
56. “How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”
57. “I am a writer. I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life, they will make my name.”
58. “I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.”
59. “I remember that as I was writing a poem on ‘Snow’ when I was eight, I said aloud, I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes on Life
60. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
61. “Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”
62. “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.”
63. “When they asked me what I wanted to be, I said I didn’t know.”
64. “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.”
65. “Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”
66. “Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people.”
67. “I do not love. I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love.”
68. “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.”
69. “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.”
70. “I hadn’t, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.”
71. “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.”
72. “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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”
73. “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”
74. “I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes About Love
75. “If they substituted the word ‘lust’ for ‘love’ in the popular songs it would come nearer to the truth.”
76. “How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.”
77. “He was always saying how his mother said, ‘What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security?’”
78. “‘If you love her,’ I said, ‘you’ll love somebody else someday.’”
79. “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.”
80. “I have room in me for love. And forever so many little lives.”
81. “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.”
82. “Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods.”
83. “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.”
84. “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.”
85. “At this rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience.”
86. “If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.”
87. “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.”
88. “I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.”
89. “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 for so long.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes on Depression
90. “And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”
91. “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.”
92. “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say, ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.’”
93. “And I sit here without identity, faceless. My head aches.”
94. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
95. “When you are insane, you are busy being insane all the time. When I was crazy, that was all I was.”
96. “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.”
97. “Yes, there is joy, fulfillment, and companionship—but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
98. “Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.”
99. “I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.”
100. “What I fear most, I think, is the death of imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black, that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world.”
101. “The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”
102. “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.”
103. “I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.”
104. “I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes About Feminism
105. “I am still so naïve. I know pretty much what I like and dislike, but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
106. “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.”
107. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
108. “I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like God, invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.”
109. “I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.”
110. “I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.”
111. “Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.”
112. “Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”
113. “Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.”
114. “I must get my soul back from you, I am killing my flesh without it.”
115. “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.”
116. “I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
117. “Every woman adores a Fascist.”
118. “How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?”
119. “Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes About Nature
120. “My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.”
121. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”
122. “The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water, blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be, were enough to watch.”
123. “I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.”
124. “If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
125. “A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.”
126. “I don’t know how long I kept at it. I felt reasonably safe, stretched out on the floor, and lay quite still.”
127. “I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets—tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides.”
128. “It didn’t seem to be summer anymore.”
129. “Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood—the wailing 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 Quotes About Death
130. “I have always been extremely fond of the definition of death which says it is, inaccessibility to experience.”
131. “‘Do you know what a poem is, Esther?’ ‘No, what?’ I would say. ‘A piece of dust.’ Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, ‘So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.’”
132. “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
133. “I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.”
134. “‘Save them for my funeral,’ I’d said.”
135. “Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.”
136. “I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
137. “So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.”
138. “A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.”
139. “We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes About Hope
140. “I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in.”
141. “I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.”
142. “This is no time for the private point of view.”
143. “Not easy to state the change you made. If I’m alive now, I was dead, though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
144. “We are not what we might be, what we are.”
145. “But when it came right down to it, the skin 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.”
146. “I am sure there are things that can’t be cured by a good bath but I can’t think of one.”
147. “I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.”
148. “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.”
149. “I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think, to think and live, to live and learn, this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”
150. “I have a visual imagination.”
151. “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.”
152. “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”
153. “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.”
154. “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 one hour more of sleep and live.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes on Happiness
155. “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.”
156. “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.”
157. “That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.”
158. “Is anyone anywhere happy?”
159. “I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”
160. “I felt proud that the baby’s first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.”
161. “Yes, I want the world’s praise, money, and love, and am furious with anyone getting ahead of me.”
162. “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter—for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.”
163. “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.”
164. “Outlaws all extrapolations. Beyond the interval of now and here, white whales are gone with the white ocean.”
Memorable Sylvia Plath Quotes
165. “You are a dream. I hope I never meet you.”
166. “Yes, I was infatuated with you, I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me.”
167. “Didn’t you know I’m going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don’t feel badly, I didn’t either!”
168. “I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.”
169. “I want books and babies and beef stews.”
170. “Mountains terrify me, they just sit about, they are so proud.”
171. “One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.”
172. “What did my arms do before they held you?”
173. “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.”
174. “All the heat and fear 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.”
175. “I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
176. “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.”
177. “Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.”
178. “Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.”
179. “I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes That Will Change Your Way of Thinking
180. “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
181. “People or stars regard me sadly, I disappoint them.”
182. “The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”
183. “I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
184. “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.”
185. “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”
186. “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.”
187. “It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
188. “I am too pure for you or anyone.”
189. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”
190. “It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.”
191. “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.”
192. “I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”
193. “I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should anymore. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”
194. “I’ve begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.”
Sylvia Plath Quotes That Will Touch Your Heart
195. “I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.”
196. “I think I made you up inside my head.”
197. “I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.”
198. “I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”
199. “The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.”
200. “I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love.”
201. “I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I’ve got to admire someone to really like them deeply, to value them as friends.”
202. “Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors. Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.”
203. “I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will.”
204. “Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip, ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.’”
More Sylvia Plath Quotes
205. “Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure, I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won’t matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is, I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes.”
206. “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”
207. “Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.”
208. “I have taken a pill to kill. The thin. Papery feeling.”
209. “I am a victim of introspection.”
210. “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.”
211. “I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue, rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations.”
212. “I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.”
213. “There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive it, recreate it.”
214. “By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.”
215. “All night your moth-breath. Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen. A far sea moves in my ear.”
216. “What I want back is what I was.”
217. “What obsession do men have for destruction and murder?”
218. “Widow. The word consumes itself.”
219. “‘What a man is an arrow into the future and what a woman is a place the arrow shoots off from?’ until it made me tired.”
220. “Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
Which of These Sylvia Plath Quotes Motivate You?
Sylvia Plath poems are a testament of survival. Plath poetry consists of honesty and provocation. Somehow, when you read it, you can feel sad and can relate to every line she is trying to imply.
Even though Sylvia Plath lives a tragic life, her poetry is truly inspirational. She influences women empowerment and speaks up about mental health issues.
The collection of Sylvia Plath quotes above will surely help you discover yourself. This will teach that life will not always be in heaven nor hell. Fight back and don’t let struggle take over you.
Which Sylvia Plath quotes are your favorites? Don’t forget to comment them down below. Share it with your friends!
