Sylvia Plath Quotes

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I am not cruel, only truthful.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I am myself. That is not enough.

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch.

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.

Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man.

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

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

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

I am silver and exact.I have no preconceptions.

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it.

Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.

I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Mother of otherness, Eat me.

Your room is not your prison. You are.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

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

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there.

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

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.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world.

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

O love, how did you get here?

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

Is there no way out of the mind?

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull.

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

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

I'm sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I'm still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt.

I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ