"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

"Kiss me and you'll know how important I am."
— Sylvia Plath

"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 (The Bell Jar)

"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 took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"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 (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"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 (The Bell Jar)

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 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 (The Bell Jar)

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

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

"Is there no way out of the mind?"
— Sylvia Plath

"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."
— Sylvia Plath

"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

"The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
— Sylvia Plath

"There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but i don't know many of them."
— Sylvia Plath

"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)

"That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world."
— Sylvia Plath (The Journals of 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 have a call."
— Sylvia Plath

"There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"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 (The Bell Jar)

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"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. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"How we need another soul to cling to."
— Sylvia Plath

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

"The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"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 Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
"Oh, sure you know," the photographer said.
"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"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 (The Bell Jar)

"I?
I walk alone;
The midnight street
Spins itself from under my feet;
My eyes shut
These dreaming houses all snuff out;
Through a whim of mine
Over gables the moon's celestial onion
Hangs high.

I
Make houses shrink
And trees diminish
By going far; my look's leash
Dangles the puppet-people
Who, unaware how they dwindle,
Laugh, kiss, get drunk,
Nor guess that if I choose to blink
They die.

I
When in good humour,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott color and forbid any flower
To be.

I
Know you appear
Vivid at my side,
Denying you sprang out of my head,
Claiming you feel
Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,
Though it's quite clear
All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,
From me.

From "Soliloquy of the Solipsist""
— Sylvia Plath (Collected Poems)

"Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night..."
— Sylvia Plath

"I am supposed to be having the time of my life."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"What did my arms do before they held you?"
— 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 (The Journals of 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 (The Bell Jar)

"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 (The Collected Poems)

"There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man would would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings."
— 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. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..."
— Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

"So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state."
— Sylvia Plath

"Character is fate."
— Sylvia Plath

"Everyone in me is a bird
I am beating all my wings"
— Sylvia Plath

"There must be quite a few things that 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 (The Bell Jar)

"Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it."
— Sylvia Plath (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement)

"“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”"
— Sylvia Plath

"I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."
— Sylvia Plath (Collected Poems)