Sylvia Plath Quotes

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

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.

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

Is it the sea you hear in me?Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

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.

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

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. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I fel...

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...

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

Not being perfect hurts.

O love, how did you get here?--Nick and the Candlestick

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

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

I hurl my heart to halt his pace.

I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itselfis a bad dream

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, i...