Sylvia Plath Quotes

Powerful Sylvia Plath for Daily Growth

About Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an acclaimed American poet and novelist, known for her profound, introspective, and often dark verse. Born in Boston, Massachusetts to German immigrant parents, she exhibited exceptional literary talent from a young age. Plath won numerous awards for her poetry during high school and college, eventually earning a scholarship to Newnham College at Cambridge University in the UK. At Cambridge, Plath met fellow poet Ted Hughes, with whom she formed a tumultuous relationship that would last until her death. They married in 1956, and the following year their daughter Frieda was born. The early years of their marriage were fraught with personal struggles, mental health issues, and the pressures of being a young mother and writer. Plath's first collection of poems, "The Colossus," was published in 1960, which gained her recognition but did not bring financial success. In 1962, she published her semi-autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar," under the pen name Victoria Lucas. The book received mixed reviews upon publication but has since become a modern classic, depicting Plath's experiences with mental illness and her struggles to find identity and purpose. Plath's most celebrated work, "Ariel," was published posthumously in 1965, just one year after she died by suicide at the age of 30. The collection became a groundbreaking and influential text within the realm of confessional poetry. With its raw and visceral exploration of pain, love, and the human psyche, "Ariel" cemented Plath's legacy as one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Her work continues to inspire generations of writers and readers alike.

Interpretations of Popular Quotes

"I am silent because the rain slacked its hurried crying."

This quote by Sylvia Plath suggests a moment of quietude, where the noise of life (symbolized by the rain) has slowed down or stopped temporarily, allowing for contemplation or reflection. The speaker, possibly Plath herself, finds solace in this stillness, as the ceasing of external distractions offers an opportunity for introspection and inner peace.

"Everyone I ever loved went away in the end, but to begin with, it's not like that. It's easy then."

This quote from Sylvia Plath reflects a sense of naivety and optimism at the start of relationships, where parting seems unlikely or difficult due to strong emotions. However, as time passes, she suggests that all loved ones eventually depart, underscoring the bittersweet reality of temporary connections in human relationships.

"I have always been dreadfully afraid of coughing."

This quote by Sylvia Plath reflects her fear not just of a physical illness, but perhaps more profoundly, a symbolic or metaphorical representation of revealing one's innermost thoughts, feelings, or vulnerabilities. Coughing is often associated with losing control over one's body and emotions, and in this context, it could signify her anxiety about expressing herself freely, especially in a society that may have been unaccepting or oppressive towards women, as hinted by Plath's life experiences. The quote suggests an internal struggle between suppressing her authentic self to maintain a facade of control and the desire for genuine emotional expression, even if it may lead to discomfort or rejection.

"The heart that has loved is a damaged heart."

This quote by Sylvia Plath suggests that experiencing deep love can leave an indelible mark on one's soul, making it vulnerable and perhaps even irreparable. Love, in its purest form, exposes our hearts to potential pain and sorrow, which can result in emotional scarring or damage. Yet, despite the risk, many choose to love, as the reward – connection, understanding, and shared joy – can be profoundly enriching. The quote serves as a reminder that love, while potentially damaging, is often worth the risk due to its transformative power.

"I think I would keep to me when I am portioned out among men, be thou the grave's black mantle, mute, inviolable cover for my soul."

This quote from Sylvia Plath suggests a longing for an inscrutable, intimate, and unchanging entity (possibly death or one's true self) to remain as her inner sanctum amidst the external male-dominated world. She desires this "grave's black mantle" to serve as a silent and inviolable protection for her soul, symbolizing the preservation of her authentic identity amidst the challenges of human interaction and societal expectations.

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

Boston, Through, Leading, Biology

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

Winter, Asking, Been, London

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

- Sylvia Plath

Fact, Critics, Works, Worthy

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

Love, Think, Raw Material, Collection

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

Smell, About, Nearest, Salt

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

I Remember, Nation, Raining, August

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

Lie, Bed, Vague, Drifting

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

Game, Tears, Away, Forgot

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

Woman, Treat, Through, Perceived

I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.

- Sylvia Plath

Salad, Other, Everybody, Chef

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

Unborn, Unborn Children, Percentage

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

London, Bomb, Housewives, Quakers

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

My Life, Nine, Inaccessible, Obsolete

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.

- Sylvia Plath

Other, Continually, Put, Inward

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

Wanting, Another, Mutually, Mutually Exclusive

I am a victim of introspection.

- Sylvia Plath

I Am, Introspection, Am, Victim

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

- Sylvia Plath

Hot, Cure, Them, Bath

Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.

- Sylvia Plath

College, Some, Everybody, Junior

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

- Sylvia Plath

Peace, Breath, Took, Deep Breath

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

Santa, Nor, Twig, Fishermen

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

My Life, Shades, Horribly, Variations

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

- Sylvia Plath

Sad, Happy, Active, Passive

There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don't have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job.

- Sylvia Plath

Career, About, Least, Suspect

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.

- Sylvia Plath

Faith, Young, Couple, Categories

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

Think, Salt, Clearest, Hills

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

- Sylvia Plath

World, Drops, Shut, Lift

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

My Life, Floods, Despairing, Currents

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

I Think, Very, Larger, Narcissistic

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

Birthday, Forgive, Had, Twentieth

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.

- Sylvia Plath

Caricature, Particularly, Dickens

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.

- Sylvia Plath

Children, Terrible, Cannot, Perfection

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.

- Sylvia Plath

Woman, Feeling, Difficult, Cambridge

If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on 'Alice in Wonderland' and believing in magic for years and years.

- Sylvia Plath

Magic, My Life, Half, Wonderland

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

- Sylvia Plath

Wisdom, Interest, Flare, Balances

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.

- Sylvia Plath

Politics, Here, Vague, Freelance

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

Discipline, Purpose, Rather, Descriptions

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.

- Sylvia Plath

Earth, Will, Ignored, Inherit

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

- Sylvia Plath

Victory, Over, Nuances, Adjectives

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

- Sylvia Plath

Nothing, Like, Pile, Unpublished

How we need another soul to cling to.

- Sylvia Plath

Soul, Need, How, Cling

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

- Sylvia Plath

Flowers, Soothing, Putting, Cracks

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

- Sylvia Plath

Small, Burn, Away, Tyrannical

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

Tide, I Think, Dozens, Tossed

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

Art, Like, Feels, Everything Else

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

Future, Woman, Arrow, Shoots

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

Father, Trust, Insurance, Shorthand

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

- Sylvia Plath

Poetry, Blood, Stopping, Jet

Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.

- Sylvia Plath

Love, Mankind, Some, I Want You

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

- Sylvia Plath

Mind, Informed, Able, Manipulate

I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.'

- Sylvia Plath

Down, I Remember, Feels, Feelings

Mountains terrify me - they just sit about; they are so proud.

- Sylvia Plath

Mountains, Proud, Terrify, Sit

There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.

- Sylvia Plath

Mental, Market, Am, Recreate

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

- Sylvia Plath

Over, Made, Saw, Ghost

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

- Sylvia Plath

Thought, How, Human Heart, Frail

I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.

- Sylvia Plath

Big, Stomach, Babies, Flour

Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).

- Sylvia Plath

Think, England, Which, Lines

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

Chill, Been, Half, Axis

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

- Sylvia Plath

Action, Indecision, Constructive

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

- Sylvia Plath

Hot, Cure, Them, Bath

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

- Sylvia Plath

Find, Wanting, Perhaps, Close

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

Pass, Grazing, Bothers, Edges

The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark evenings closing in mid-afternoon, and will try to lay in some physical comforts these months - the best insurance against gloominess for me.

- Sylvia Plath

Insurance, Next, Some, Comforts

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

Imagination, Outgoing, About, Self-Doubt

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

- Sylvia Plath

Never, Expect, Anybody, Disappointed

Every woman adores a Fascist.

- Sylvia Plath

Woman, Every, Fascist

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

Navy, Entertainment, Before, Silver

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

Through, Caught, Set, Wall

I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.

- Sylvia Plath

Think, Like, Begun, Jew

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

- Sylvia Plath

Romantic, Important, How, Kiss

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

- Sylvia Plath

Think, I Think, Poems, Emotional Experiences

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

- Sylvia Plath

Best, My Life, Will, Poems

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

- Sylvia Plath

Time, Busy, Being, Insane

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.

- Sylvia Plath

Want, Books, Babies, Beef

Widow. The word consumes itself.

- Sylvia Plath

Word, Itself, Consumes, Widow

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

- Sylvia Plath

Skin, Wear, Your, Heart

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

- Sylvia Plath

Freedom, How, Use, Employ

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

- Sylvia Plath

God, Sky, Empty, Talk

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

- Sylvia Plath

Going, Entertaining, Badly, Author

I have a visual imagination.

- Sylvia Plath

Imagination, Visual

I am too pure for you or anyone.

- Sylvia Plath

I Am, Too, Am, Anyone

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

- Sylvia Plath

Best, You, Lot, Harm

If you're searching for quotes on a different topic, feel free to browse our Topics page or explore a diverse collection of quotes from various Authors to find inspiration.