Sylvia Plath Quotes (Famous Quotes to Inspire You for Greatness)
Sylvia Plath was a renowned American poet and novelist who lived from October 27, 1932, to February 11, 1963. Her art directly relates to her personal experience and explores subjects like self, death, and nature. Read these Sylvia Plath quotes to know more about her and get inspired.
Sylvia Plath Quotes
Her published collections “The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, as well as The Bell Jar” are among of her most well-known works. She is recognized for developing the confessional poetry genre and made history by being the first recipient of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
1. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
2. “Of course, I didn’t believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn’t have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
3. “I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
4. “Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.” “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
5. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”–Sylvia Plath
6. “I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and
7. “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”–Sylvia Plath
Inspiring Quotes
8. “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
9. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
10. “All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
11. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
12. “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
13. “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 one hour more of sleep and live.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
14. “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
15. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
16. “Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Useful Quotes
17. “If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if I didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
18. “Yes, I want the world’s praise, money, and love, and am furious with anyone…getting ahead of me.”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
19. “Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
20. “With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead.” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
21. “Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?”–Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
22. “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” Sylvia Plath
23. Plath’s thoughts on mental illness—particularly those that resulted from musings on depressive episodes—are bleak windows into how insurmountable depression can feel and reminders that those who suffer are never alone.
24. “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”–Sylvia Plath
Amazing Quotes
25. “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 every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
26. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
27. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
28. “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.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Plath Quotes
29. “I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
30. “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
31. The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my silence.
32. “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.”–Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
33. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”–Sylvia Plath
34. “But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”–Sylvia Plath
35. The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.
36. “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.”–Sylvia Plath
37. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
38. “Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.” – Sylvia Plath
Motivational Quotes
39. “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
40. “Kiss me and you will see how important I am.”– Sylvia Plath
41. “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
42. “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.” – Sylvia Plat
43. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”–Sylvia Plath
44. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.” “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
45. “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”–Sylvia Plath
46. “How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought.”– Sylvia Plath
47. “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
48. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.”–Sylvia Plath
49. “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.”–Sylvia Plath
Wonderful Quotes
50. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”–Sylvia Plath
51. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” ― Sylvia Plath
52. “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.” – Sylvia Plath
53. “Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.”– Sylvia Plath
54. The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.
55. 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.
56. I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them. “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
57. But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
58. There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
59. I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
60. When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.
61. Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
62. If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Wise Sayings
63. 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.
64. What did my fingers do before they held him
65. 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.
66. I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am.
67. I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
68. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
69. Wear your heart on your skin in this life.
Interesting Quotes
70. The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
71. Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?
72. I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow. “Sylvia Plath Quotes”
73. “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.”
74. What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
75. I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
In her adult life, Plath experienced severe periods of clinical depression, for which she received many sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Sadly, she killed herself in 1963.
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CSN Team.
