Top 673 Quotes & Sayings by Sylvia Plath

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Sylvia Plath.

Last updated on November 22, 2024.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963. The Collected Poems were published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.

American - Novelist | October 27, 1932 - February 11, 1963

Source: Wikipedia

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

Sylvia Plath

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Sylvia Plath

How we need another soul to cling to.

Sylvia Plath

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.

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

I am a victim of introspection.

Sylvia Plath

I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

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

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.

Sylvia Plath

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.'

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

Mountains terrify me - they just sit about; they are so proud.

Sylvia Plath

There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

Is there no way out of the mind?

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

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

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

I am too pure for you or anyone.

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

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

Sylvia Plath

I have a visual imagination.

Sylvia Plath

Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.

Sylvia Plath

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).

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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.

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

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

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.

Sylvia Plath

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath

Every woman adores a Fascist.

Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

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

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

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

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.

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