Sylvia Plath quotes

Born
October 27, 1932 Boston, Massachusetts, US.

Died
February 11, 1963.

Occupation
Poet.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer.

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
– Sylvia Plath

When you are insane, you are busy being insane – all the time.
– Sylvia Plath

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

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.
– Sylvia Plath

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.
– Sylvia Plath

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
– Sylvia Plath

How we need another soul to cling to.
– Sylvia Plath

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.
– Sylvia Plath

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.
– Sylvia Plath

I am a victim of introspection.
– Sylvia Plath

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
– Sylvia Plath

Didn’t you know I’m going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don’t feel badly, I didn’t either!
– Sylvia Plath

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

I’ve begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.
– Sylvia Plath

Widow. The word consumes itself.
– Sylvia Plath

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

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.
– Sylvia Plath

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.
– Sylvia Plath

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.
– Sylvia Plath

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.
– Sylvia Plath

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.
– Sylvia Plath

I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.
– Sylvia Plath

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
– Sylvia Plath

Mountains terrify me – they just sit about; they are so proud.
– Sylvia Plath

What I want back is what I was.
– Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
– Sylvia Plath

How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought.
– Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
– Sylvia Plath

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

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.
– Sylvia Plath

I have a visual imagination.
– Sylvia Plath

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.
– Sylvia Plath

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
– Sylvia Plath

I talk to God but the sky is empty.
– Sylvia Plath

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.
– Sylvia Plath

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled ‘Rain’ pour in from across the nation.’
– Sylvia Plath

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

I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.
– Sylvia Plath

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