Sylvia Plath Best Quotes

#1. In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.

Sylvia Plath

#2. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.

Sylvia Plath

#3. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

Sylvia Plath

#4. If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel.

Sylvia Plath

#5. Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962

Sylvia Plath

#6. I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

#8. I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

Sylvia Plath

#9. Shut up in public those bloody private wounds.

Sylvia Plath

#10. I hated to serve men in any way.

Sylvia Plath

#11. The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird.

Sylvia Plath

#12. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

Sylvia Plath

#13. What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

Sylvia Plath

#14. On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.

Sylvia Plath

#15. Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair
Tangling in the tide's green fall
Now fold their wings like bats and disappear
Into the attic of the skull.

Sylvia Plath

#16. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception.

Sylvia Plath

#17. This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

Sylvia Plath

#18. It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries.

Sylvia Plath

#19. It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual ...

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

#21. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best.

Sylvia Plath

#22. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow
and torment me.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

#25. I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.

Sylvia Plath

#26. Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

#28. Tomorrow is another day toward death.

Sylvia Plath

#29. 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?

Sylvia Plath

#30. The consequences of love affairs would stop me from my independent freedom of creative activity, and I don't intend to be stopped.

Sylvia Plath

#31. What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

Sylvia Plath

#32. It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one-not at all.

Sylvia Plath

#33. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.

Sylvia Plath

#34. You know what lies are for.

Sylvia Plath

#35. I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

Sylvia Plath

#36. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Sylvia Plath

#37. He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death,
Her wormy couriers are at his bones.
Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.

Sylvia Plath

#38. 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.

Sylvia Plath

#39. What did my arms do before they held you?

Sylvia Plath

#40. Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

Sylvia Plath

#41. And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments.

Sylvia Plath

#42. O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
From the poem "Cut", 24 October 1962

Sylvia Plath

#43. Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

#45. If I have a dry spell ... I wait and live harder, eyes, ears, and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer.

Sylvia Plath

#46. Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

Sylvia Plath

#47. Remember how you asked me where would I like to live best, the country or the city?"
"And you said ... "
"And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?

Sylvia Plath

#48. Though it's quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.

Sylvia Plath