Sylvia Plath Quotes

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
― Sylvia Plath , The Collected Poems

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“My world falls apart, crumbles, “The centre cannot hold.” There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralysed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going—and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. I long for a noble escape from freedom—I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will. There is nowhere to go.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“How we need that security. 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“...it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, 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, The Bell Jar

“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, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I don't know how long I kept at it...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I’m so pathetically intense. I just can’t be any other way.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2: 1956-1963 – A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet's Intimate Correspondence on Marriage and Mental Health

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless 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 at.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted"

- Sylvia Plath's epitaph (from Wu Cheng'en's novel Journey to the West aka. Monkey, translated by Arthur Waley)”
― Wu Cheng'en

“Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Over your body the clouds go
High, high and icily
And a little flat, as if they

Floated on a glass that was invisible.
Unlike swans,
Having no reflections;

Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
All cool, all blue. Unlike you

You, there on your back,
Eyes to the sky.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“Even amongst fierce flames/ The golden lotus can be planted.”
― Bhagavid-Gita

“[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.”
― Anne Carson

“if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There is history to read- centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“My mind is killing me”
— The Glass Child, Stuck In My Mind”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath