43 Sylvia Plath Quotes To Make You Think About Life And Win 2024

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

2. “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

3. “I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” – Sylvia Plath

4. “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.” – Sylvia Plath

5. “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.” – Sylvia Plath

6. “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

7. “I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.” – Sylvia Plath

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

9. “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.” – Sylvia Plath

10. “Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.” – Sylvia Plath

11. “All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.” – Sylvia Plath

12. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.” – Sylvia Plath

13. “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.” – Sylvia Plath

14. “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

15. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath

16. “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” – Sylvia Plath

17. “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” – Sylvia Plath

18. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” – Sylvia Plath

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

20. “If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if I didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.” – Sylvia Plath

21. “Yes, I want the world’s praise, money, and love, and am furious with anyone…getting ahead of me.” – Sylvia Plath

22. “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

23. “With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead.” – Sylvia Plath

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

25. “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

26. “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 one hour more of sleep and live.” – Sylvia Plath

27. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath

28. “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

29. “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

30. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.” – Sylvia Plath

31. “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.’” – Sylvia Plath

32. “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.” – Sylvia Plath

33. “The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.” – Sylvia Plath

34. “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.” – Sylvia Plath

35. “I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.” – Sylvia Plath

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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.” – Sylvia Plath

40. “Of course, I didn’t believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn’t have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.” – Sylvia Plath

41. “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 swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.” – Sylvia Plath

42. “Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.” – Sylvia Plath

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