Sylvia Plath Quotes

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

I am vertical, but I would rather be horizontal.

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection.

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

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

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

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

I desire the things which will later destroy me in the end.

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

Maybe it is better to hope beforehand, before all possible disappointment, that there may be a limited form of happiness.

How many times can our emotions be broken and reassembled before they cease to be recognizable to us?

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

I want to be all the things I am capable of becoming.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

I write only because, in order to live, I have to.

It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

I am only thirty. I have become a clock without hands, a weight without balance.

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

I felt empty and sad for years, and for a long, long time, alcohol worked. I’d drink, and all the sadness would go away.

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

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

Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his intellect, a laggard.

How much longer can I go on aging, growing more and more exasperated at this decaying body?

Why do I write? It stirs up my insides to think about it.

I don’t know when we’ll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do.

I should be incapable of drawing a single stroke at the present moment.

I talk to God, but the sky is empty.

I don’t know what is the matter with me. I don’t know why I feel so dizzy when I go out.

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

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

I’m glad you enjoyed it. Now go away.

I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.

I am myself. That is not enough.

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.

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

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.

I am not a schizophrenic. I am not psychotic. I am not mad. I am lonely.

I never wanted to become what they call a ‘domestic goddess.’ I simply tried to fill the holes I perceived in my own childhood.

The thing I realize is, that it’s not what you take, it’s what you leave.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I don’t patronize bunny rabbits; I kill them.

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

I am alone here in New York, no longer a weaver of words, a writer. I sit at my desk and for long periods nothing happens. The blotter is clean, the desk lamp shines. I can see my face in the blotter fine from my vantage point on the twenty-seventh floor of a midtown skyscraper. I frighten myself because I see nothing in the mirror, save a white face, bloodless.