Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
Sylvia Plath
If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
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
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
Sylvia Plath
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
Sylvia Plath
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
Sylvia Plath
My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.
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
Wear your heart on your skin in this life.
Sylvia Plath
For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen – skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women.
Sylvia Plath
I felt proud that the baby’s first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.
Sylvia Plath
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.
Sylvia Plath
How we need another soul to cling to.
Sylvia Plath
The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water – blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be – were enough to watch.
Sylvia Plath
Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of 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
In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, ‘Do you ever have snow at all?’ as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. ‘Ooo, I do remember snow,’ was the usual reply, ‘when I were a lad.’
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
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
How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought.
Sylvia Plath
The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath
Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
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
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
Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
Sylvia Plath
I am a victim of introspection.
Sylvia Plath
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
Sylvia Plath
Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
Sylvia Plath
Mountains terrify me – they just sit about; they are so proud.
Sylvia Plath
Every woman adores a Fascist.
Sylvia Plath
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.
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
Is there no way out of the mind?
Sylvia Plath
Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing – and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.
Sylvia Plath
Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.
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
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
But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
Sylvia Plath
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
Sylvia Plath
I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets – tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched.
Sylvia Plath
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
Sylvia Plath
That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.
Sylvia Plath
When you are insane, you are busy being insane – all the time.
Sylvia Plath
My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land – the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
Sylvia Plath
I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue – rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.
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
When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.
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 saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear – red and orange and green banners, ‘Ban the Bomb!’ etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan, dusty marchers, knapsacks on their backs – Quakers and Catholics, Africans and whites, Algerians and French – 40 percent were London housewives.
Sylvia Plath
I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.
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
What I want back is what I was.
Sylvia Plath