Top 15 Sylvia Plath Quotes

American poet and writer (1932–1963)

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Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 – 11 February 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was the first wife of Ted Hughes.

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Pen Names: Victoria Lucas

Alternative Names: Sylvia Plath Hughes

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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 my life. And I am horribly limited.

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.

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

If you expect nothing from somebody you are 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.

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery — air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

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

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

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.)

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

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those.

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.