Authors — Quotes

Sylvia Plath Quotes: 66

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 my life. And I am horribly limited.
The Unabridged Journals of 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.
If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
The Bell Jar
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
The 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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
The Bell Jar
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
The Bell Jar
let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
The Bell Jar
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Is there no way out of the mind?
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
The Bell Jar
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.
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Ariel: The Restored Edition
I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Wear your heart on your skin in this life.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
The Bell Jar
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
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 have a call.
Ariel
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.
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
The Bell Jar
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.
The Collected Poems
I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
The Bell Jar
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Is anyone anywhere happy?
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.
The Collected Poems
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
The Bell Jar
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.
The Bell Jar
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I have stitched life into me like a rare organ
I’ll never speak to God again.
I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Ariel
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.
The Bell Jar
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.
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
The Bell Jar
What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.
I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
The Bell Jar