110+ Sylvia Plath Quotes On Writing, Depression And Loneliness

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist. She was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts and was an influential writer of the 20th century. Plath is best known for her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and her poetry collections, Ariel and The Colossus and Other Poems. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sylvia Plath on life, writing, love.

Top 10 Sylvia Plath Quotes

1. Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.
2. I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.
3. If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.
4. What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
5. I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
6. 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.
7. If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.
8. Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.
9. I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
10. There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Sylvia Plath Image Quotes

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am. — Sylvia Plath

Widow. The word consumes itself. — Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Short Quotes

• Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
• Widow. The word consumes itself.
• August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
• I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.
• And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.
• Is there no way out of the mind?
• I talk to God but the sky is empty.
• The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
• There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.
• I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Life

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. — Sylvia Plath

Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming? — Sylvia Plath

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible. — 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. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy. — Sylvia Plath

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you. — Sylvia Plath

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen. — Sylvia Plath

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Writing

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. — Sylvia Plath

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences. — Sylvia Plath

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I. — 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. — Sylvia Plath

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it. — Sylvia Plath

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing." — Sylvia Plath

You ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason?... I write only because there is a voice within me. That will not be still. — Sylvia Plath

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. — Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing. — 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

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Love

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. — Sylvia Plath

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever. — Sylvia Plath

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness — Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. — Sylvia Plath

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try. — Sylvia Plath

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn. — Sylvia Plath

Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? — 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

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth. — Sylvia Plath

I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Depression

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. — Sylvia Plath

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. — Sylvia Plath

I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated. — Sylvia Plath

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use. — Sylvia Plath

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was. — Sylvia Plath

Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens. — Sylvia Plath

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired. — Sylvia Plath

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed. — Sylvia Plath

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. — Sylvia Plath

I’ll never speak to God again. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Loneliness

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering. — Sylvia Plath

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion. — Sylvia Plath

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

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Feminism

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. — 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. — Sylvia Plath

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends. — Sylvia Plath

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past. — Sylvia Plath

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. — Sylvia Plath

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. — Sylvia Plath

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. — Sylvia Plath

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

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free. — Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath Quotes About World

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

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

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

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world. — Sylvia Plath

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow. — Sylvia Plath

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable. — Sylvia Plath

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world. — Sylvia Plath

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism. — Sylvia Plath

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over. — Sylvia Plath

Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About People

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. — Sylvia Plath

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently. — Sylvia Plath

Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar. — Sylvia Plath

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl? — Sylvia Plath

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out. — Sylvia Plath

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous. — Sylvia Plath

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning. — Sylvia Plath

I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife. — 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

I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Feel

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

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

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence. — Sylvia Plath

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike. — Sylvia Plath

I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence...luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged. — Sylvia Plath

Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me. — Sylvia Plath

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady . . . I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others? — Sylvia Plath

I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little. — Sylvia Plath

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles. — Sylvia Plath

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Years

I didn't know what I was doing in New York. — Sylvia Plath

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. — Sylvia Plath

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

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. — Sylvia Plath

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may. — Sylvia Plath

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. — Sylvia Plath

I'm about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire. — Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath Famous Quotes And Sayings

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 life. And I am horribly limited. — Sylvia Plath

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

Widow. The word consumes itself. — Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. — 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. — Sylvia Plath

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love. — Sylvia Plath

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. — Sylvia Plath

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls. — Sylvia Plath

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds. — 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. — Sylvia Plath

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir. — Sylvia Plath

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain ... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good. — Sylvia Plath

I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God. — Sylvia Plath

I am myself. That is not enough. — Sylvia Plath

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again? — Sylvia Plath

Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man. — Sylvia Plath

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you. — Sylvia Plath

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere. — Sylvia Plath

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me. — Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact.I have no preconceptions. — Sylvia Plath

Tomorrow is another day toward death. — Sylvia Plath

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart. — Sylvia Plath

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

Your room is not your prison. You are. — Sylvia Plath

I'm sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I'm still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt. — Sylvia Plath

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. — Sylvia Plath

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air. — Sylvia Plath

Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. — Sylvia Plath

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull. — Sylvia Plath

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on top of the beer can — Sylvia Plath

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

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die. — Sylvia Plath

Don't let the wicked city get you down. — Sylvia Plath

The box is only temporary. — Sylvia Plath

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ — Sylvia Plath

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm — Sylvia Plath

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists — Sylvia Plath

The abstract kills, the concrete saves. — Sylvia Plath

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. — Sylvia Plath

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through. — Sylvia Plath

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul. — Sylvia Plath

Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. — Sylvia Plath

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas. — Sylvia Plath

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security. — Sylvia Plath

Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending. — Sylvia Plath

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. — Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. — Sylvia Plath

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

Life Lessons by Sylvia Plath

1. Sylvia Plath encourages us to embrace our individualism and to be unapologetic in our pursuit of our dreams and passions.
2. She also teaches us to be resilient and to not be afraid to confront our struggles, no matter how difficult they may be.
3. Lastly, she reminds us to be mindful of our mental health and to take care of ourselves in order to live a fulfilling life.