Top 40 Sylvia Plath Quotes

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.’

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.

I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.

Every woman adores a Fascist.

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.

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

For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen – skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.

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.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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!

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

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

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.

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.

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

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I have a visual imagination.

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.

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

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.

How we need another soul to cling to.

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.

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.

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.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

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.

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

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

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

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.

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.