Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963. Hope, our collection of Sylvia Plath Quotes will inspire you to live with freedom and peace.
Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.
– Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath Quotes
1. “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
2. “You have to be able to make a real creative life for yourself, before you can expect anyone else to provide one ready-made for you.” – Sylvia Plath
3. “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” – Sylvia Plath
4. “Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.” – Sylvia Plath
5. “One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.” – Sylvia Plath
6. “Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.” – Sylvia Plath
7. “The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.” – Sylvia Plath
8. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” – Sylvia Plath
9. “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” – Sylvia Plath
10. “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” – Sylvia Plath
11. “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
12. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” – Sylvia Plath
13. “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.” – Sylvia Plath
14. “But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.” – Sylvia Plath
15. “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.” – Sylvia Plath
16. “How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought.” – Sylvia Plath
17. “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
18. “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
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. “When you are insane, you are busy being insane – all the time.” – Sylvia Plath
21. “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.” – Sylvia Plath
22. “So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.” – Sylvia Plath
23. “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” – Sylvia Plath
24. “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” – Sylvia Plath
25. “I talk to God but the sky is empty.” – Sylvia Plath
26. “Every woman adores a Fascist.” – Sylvia Plath
27. “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter—for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” – Sylvia Plath
28. “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.” – Sylvia Plath
29. “I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.” – Sylvia Plath
30. “Wear your heart on your skin in this life.” – Sylvia Plath
31. “Opinions are like orgasms…mine matters most and I really don’t care if you have one.” – Sylvia Plath
32. “All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.” – Sylvia Plath
33. “Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.” – Sylvia Plath
34. “Poetry is a tyrannical discipline.” – Sylvia Plath
35. “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
36. “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath
37. “I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.” – Sylvia Plath
38. “I always like someone who can teach me something practical.” – Sylvia Plath
39. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” – Sylvia Plath
40. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath
