Sylvia Plath Quotes

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.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

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.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

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.

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.

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

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

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

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

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.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

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.

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

I think I made you up inside my head.

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.

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.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

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.

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

How we need another soul to cling to.

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.

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.

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

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

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.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.