Sylvia Plath Quotes

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.

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

A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing mor...

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?How long can I beGentling the sun with the shade of my hand,Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrowLap...

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a...

I am too pure for you or anyone.From the poem Fever 103°, 20 October 1962

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

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...

I hadn't slept for seven nights.My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, lumin...

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...

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

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

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart?

And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering o...

I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go...

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fall...

Out of the ash I rise with my red hairand I eat men like air.