Sylvia Plath Quotes

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water – blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be – were enough to watch.

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.

I am a writer… I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

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.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

Mountains terrify me – they just sit about; they are so proud.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

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

Every woman adores a Fascist.

Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing – and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.