Sylvia Plath Quotes:

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Topics: Ideas, Age, Feminism, Middle Ages

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.

Topics: Life, Sad, Creativity, Self-doubt, Improvising

Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.

Topics: Girl, Sex, Kindness

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Topics: Heartbreak, Home, Long

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

Topics: Book, Famous Inspirational, Skills

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.

Topics: Eye, Air, Jars, Bell Jar

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

Topics: Sadness, Mad, Choices

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

Topics: Love, Dream, Cutting, Infatuated

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Topics: Dark, Long, Soul, Grinning, Gaiety

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

Topics: Laughing, Waiting, Sides

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

Topics: Desire, Feminism, Classic

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.

Topics: Moving, Eye, Feminism, Bell Jar

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

Topics: Encouraging, Rejection, Trying

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

Topics: Self, Hurtful, Together, Joie De Vivre, Self Questioning

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Topics: Kissing, Feminism, Important, Just Kiss Me, Kisses And Hugs

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

Topics: Jealous, Writing, Thinking, I Am Jealous

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

Topics: Giving, Soul, Body

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

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Inspiring, Deep Listening, Deep Breath

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.

Topics: Jobs, Satisfied

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

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.37, Anchor

Topics: Love Life, Color

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Topics: Inspirational, Sad, Women, Inspirational Stress Relief, Stress Management

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

Topics: Girl, Sleep, Night, Open Fields, Misconstrued

How we need another soul to cling to.

Topics: Loneliness, Soul, Needs

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

Topics: Friendship, Inspiring, Funny Best Friend, Old Friendship, Bell Jar

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.

Topics: Roots, Do Not Fear, Bottom

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

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.

Topics: Regret, Past, Hardest

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

Topics: Life, Despair, Feminism, Little Love

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

Don't let the wicked city get you down.

Topics: Cities, Wicked, Bell Jar

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

Topics: Depression, Silence, Feminism, Bell Jar

Opinions are like orgasms...mine matters most and I really don't care if you have one.

Topics: Care, Matter, Opinion

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

Topics: World, Sickness, Victim

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.

Topics: Song, Silence

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

Topics: Life, Home, Writing

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Topics: Beautiful, Moon, Impression

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

Topics: Flower, Tree, Mind

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

Topics: Sleep, Years, White

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.

Topics: Unique, Moon, Light, Empty Streets

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more...

Topics: Happiness, Sweet, Tired, Strawberries, Empty Houses

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

Topics: Friendship, Air, Should

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

Topics: Fall, Comforting, Fallen, Bell Jar

I am what I feel and think and do.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.23, Anchor

Topics: Thinking, Feels

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 on hour more of sleep and live.

Topics: Life, Tired, Sleep, No Sleep

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.

Topics: Knives, Sky, White, Dispassionate

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

Topics: Mother, Thinking, Too Much, Bell Jar, Thinking Too Much

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

Topics: Skulls, Yesterday, Slime

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

Topics: Writing, Voice, Stills

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Topics: Summer, Fall, Rain, Summer Rain, Summer To Fall

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

Topics: Lying, Love Is, Shadow

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

Topics: Beautiful, Shadow, World, Bell Jar

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.

Topics: Thinking, People, Raw Materials

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

Topics: Truth Love

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.

Topics: Beautiful, Sleep, Tree, Figs

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.

Topics: Identity, Ache, Faceless

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.

Topics: Eye, Silence, Negative, Blackness, Hollow

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

Topics: Darkness, Cracks

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

Topics: Spring, Eye, World, Bewitched, Through My Eyes

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

Topics: Crazy, Light, Opposites, Demoralizing, Bell Jar

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

Topics: Unique, Delight, Strange

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Topics: Jobs, Writing, Expression

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

Topics: Time Of My Life, Bell Jar

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.

Topics: Depression, Air, Paris

Is there no way out of the mind?

Topics: Mind, Feminism, Way

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

Topics: Girl, People, Strange

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

Topics: Soul, Feminism, Flesh

The box is only temporary.

Topics: Boxes, Temporary

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Topics: Success, Writing, Stink, Writing By Writers

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.

Topics: Stupid, People, Dull

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.

Topics: Fake People, Women, Independent, Cambridge

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

Topics: Running, Queens, Ambition

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

Topics: Thinking, Important, Needs

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

Topics: Truth, White, Blue, Relatable, Defenseless

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... 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. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

Topics: Pain, Taken, Bye, Live Every Moment

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

Topics: Mean, Winter, Simple, Snowfall

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

Topics: Unrequited Love, Heart, Giving, Unrequited

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

Topics: Girl, Being Different, Important

I am myself. That is not enough.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.185, Faber & Faber

Topics: Chaos, Conformity, Enough

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

Topics: Art, Crazy, Mad

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Topics: Children, Perfection, Terrible

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

source: - Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Frances Monson McCullough (1991). “The journals of Sylvia Plath”

Topics: Pain, Thinking, Understanding

There is more than one good way to drown.

Topics: Way, Good Way

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.

Topics: Girl, Thinking, Cooking

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

Topics: Bell Jar, Said, Wanted

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

Topics: Missing, Grass, Solitary

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

Topics: Trying, Honest, Being Honest

I think I made you up inside my head.

Topics: Thinking, Made

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

Topics: Numbers, Mad, People

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

Topics: Fall, People, Feminism

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

Topics: Crazy, Two, People

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

Topics: Going Away, Awful, Want, Want To Go Away

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

Topics: Trying, Wanted

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

Topics: Heart, Faces, World

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Topics: Depression, Running, Two

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Topics: Two, Hell, Neurotic, Bell Jar

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-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.

Topics: Clever, Loneliness, Jealous, Dark Trees

What did my arms do before they held you?

Topics: Arms

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.

Topics: Love, Acceptance, Giving

Is anyone anywhere happy?

Topics: Happiness

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

Topics: Sleep, Dark, Dark Things, Agitate

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

Topics: Girl, Baby, Adventure

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Topics: Moon, Thinking, Insane, Bewitched

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

Topics: Tattoo, Heart, Skins

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

Topics: Silence, Want, Blackness

Your room is not your prison. You are.

Topics: Rooms, Prison, Your Room

Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

Topics: Mother, Responsibility, Broken, Mother Goose, Responsibilities In Life

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

Topics: Christmas, Disappointment, Turkeys, Carols, Day After Christmas

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

Topics: Country, Forever, Mind

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Topics: Feminism, Classic, Being A Woman

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

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.149, Anchor

Topics: Reading, Thinking, Long

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

Topics: Born, Ritual, Bell Jar

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

Topics: Heart, Pool, Frail

I am not cruel, only truthful.

Topics: Truthful

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

Topics: Goal, Feminism, Classic

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Topics: Sleep, Night, Want

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness

Topics: Loneliness, Moving, May, Moving Away, New Horizons

I like people too much or not at all.

Topics: I Hate You, People, Too Much

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

Topics: Happiness, Nature, Air, Beautiful Nature, Mountain Air

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Topics: Sad, God, Fear, God Works In Mysterious Ways, Conversations With God

I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with.

Topics: Blazing, Deserve

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

Topics: Burning, Earth, Carousels

The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.

Topics: Moon, Darkness, Bones

O heart, such disorganization!

Topics: Heart, Disorganization

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

Topics: Being Yourself, Responsibility, Hell

You've only got so long to live.

Topics: Long

I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that.

Topics: World, This World, Worthy

Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me.

Topics: Melting, Feels, Melting Away

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

Topics: Who I Am, Answers

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.

Topics: Fool, Tonight, May

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

Topics: Ideas, Accomplishment, Forever

I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted.

Topics: Taken, Taken For Granted, Want

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?

Topics: Littles, Little Love, Understand Me

I want to be silverly beautiful.

Topics: Beautiful

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Topics: Character, Fate, Numbness, Cried

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

Topics: Eye, Cutting, Pie, Server

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.136, Anchor

Topics: Errors, Flesh, Gorgeous

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

Topics: Sadness, Madness, Intoxicated

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

Topics: Expectations, Feminism, Classic, Bell Jar, Never Expect

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

source: - "Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956".

Topics: Regret, Past, Feminism, Tainted, Hardest Thing

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

Topics: Rooms, Prison, Your Room

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.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.18, Anchor

Topics: Dream, Past, Here I Am, Bundles, Future Dreams

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

Topics: Chaos, Cold, Kind

We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.110, Anchor

Topics: Running, Dream, Moving

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.66, Faber & Faber

Topics: Girl, Thinking, Cooking

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die.

Topics: Needs, Attention, Knows

I dream too much, work too little.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.542, Faber & Faber

Topics: Dream, Littles, Too Much, Too Much Work

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.101, Anchor

Topics: Trying, Dresses, Different

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.226, Faber & Faber

Topics: Thinking, Imagination

That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.102, Anchor

Topics: Love Life, Giving, Matter

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

source: - "Lady Lazarus" l. 82 (1963)

Topics: Men, Hair, Ashes, Red Hair

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.15, Anchor

Topics: Happiness, Happy, Thinking, Thinking Too Much

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 them.

source: - Sylvia Plath (1994). “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”

Topics: People, Shut Up, Boxes

I wish you’d find the exit out of my head.

Topics: Wish, Exit, Wish You

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “Letters Home”, p.301, Faber & Faber

Topics: Struggle, Simple, Thinking, Constant Struggle, Somber

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2008). “The Bell Jar”, p.96, Faber & Faber

Topics: Silly, People, Ends

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.60, Anchor

Topics: Eye, Feminism, Pits, Mimicking, Caverns

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.184, Anchor

Topics: Writing, Feminism, Classic, Live Love, Bell Jar

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.16, Anchor

Topics: Feelings, Care, Mutual

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.41, Hamilton Books

Topics: World, Racehorses, Most Heartfelt, Engraved

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

Topics: World, Touch Me, Feels

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.

Topics: Mother, Baby, Stars, Minerals

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, Anchor

Topics: Hours, Day Life

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.25, Anchor

Topics: Love Life, Little Love, Understand Me, I Love Life

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.205, Faber & Faber

Topics: Stars, Flower, Dew

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, Anchor

Topics: Cheer, Spring, Soul

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.163, Faber & Faber

Topics: World, Height, Desperate, Deluded

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.70, Anchor

Topics: Want, Capable

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2000). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962”, Anchor

Topics: Depression, Stars, Writing, Very Depressed

The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel”, p.69, Faber & Faber

Topics: Drunk, Scent, Magnolias, Claws

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.81, Anchor

Topics: Another Day, Tomorrow, Tomorrow Is Another Day

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

source: - Sylvia Plath (2010). “Winter Trees”, p.35, Faber & Faber

Topics: Heart, My Heart, Fingers

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

source: - Richard M. Matovich, Sylvia Plath (1986). “A concordance to The collected poems of Sylvia Plath”, Scholarly Title

Topics: Fossils, Numb

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, Faber & Faber

Topics: Sky

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, Faber & Faber

Topics: Love Is, Bones, Curse

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way–and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.47, Anchor

Topics: Long, Goal, Trying

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. 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.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.53, Hamilton Books

Topics: Depression, Taken, Eye, Bell Jar, Picture Taken

If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.

source: - Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Schober Plath (1975). “Letters home: correspondence, 1950-1963”, HarperCollins Publishers

Topics: War, Soldier, Would Be, Martyred

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath”, p.50, Faber & Faber

Topics: Twenties, Bones, Dies

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.74, Hamilton Books

You smile. No, it is not fatal.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2010). “Ariel: The Restored Edition”, p.132, Faber & Faber

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.9, Anchor

Topics: Living My Life

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

Topics: Lying, Flower, Hands, Peacefulness, Daze

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future!

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.205, Anchor

Topics: Acceptance, Winning, Past, Personal Identity, True Worth

I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.13, Hamilton Books

Topics: Night, Doors, Ends

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.163, Faber & Faber

Topics: Sunset, Atrocities

I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath”, p.33, Faber & Faber

Topics: Truthful, Dislike, Preconceptions

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.67, Anchor

Topics: Depression, Home, Cutting, Cutting Off, Opening Doors

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.98, Anchor

Topics: Mother, Selfless, World, My Own World, Concise

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.4, Faber & Faber

Topics: Stars, Real, Islands

A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.43, Hamilton Books

Topics: Men, Two, Together

Character is fate.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2011). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.34, Faber & Faber

Topics: Character, Fate

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

Topics: Sarcastic, Hurt, Sometimes, Callous

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2016). “The Bell Jar”, p.103, Hamilton Books

Topics: Mother, Rose, Funeral

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2008). “The Bell Jar”, p.74, Faber & Faber

Topics: Reflection, Window, Moments, Shop Windows

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.43, Anchor

Topics: Book, People, Want

The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.287, Anchor

Topics: Abstract, Concrete

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.31, Anchor

Topics: Loneliness, Self, Joy, Grinning, Gaiety

I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.

source: - Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.191, Anchor

Topics: Needs, World

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

source: - Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.165, Anchor

Topics: Girl, Who I Am, Passionate, Like And Dislike