Sylvia Plath Quotes

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

Fixed stars govern a life

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

The tongues of hell are dull.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. --From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song

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

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

Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.

I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

This is a case without a body.The body does not come into it at all.

She looked terrible, but very wise.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.

I am your opus.

All the gods know is destinations.

Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.

I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more

New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.

Wind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

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

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 a visual imagination.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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