70 Sylvia Plath Quotes on Life, Love, and Womanhood

Sylvia Plath is one of the most iconic poets of the 20th century, known for her deep, emotional, and often raw exploration of life, love, and the complexities of being a woman.

Plath wasn’t afraid to write about the raw, complicated emotions that many of us can relate to, and that’s what makes her work so memorable. It’s deep, it’s emotional, and it’s honest.

So, if you’re a fan of her work or just curious to explore her thoughts, this list has something meaningful for everyone.

Best Sylvia Plath Quotes

• “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” — The Bell Jar
• “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again.” — From Mad Girl’s Love Song
• “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.'” — The Bell Jar
• “I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• “If you expect nothing from somebody, you are never disappointed.” — 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 my life. And I am horribly limited.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “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.” — Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.”
• “I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sad Sylvia Plath Quotes

• “Is there no way out of the mind?” — Apprehensions
• “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.” — The Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” – The Bell Jar
• “I am inhabited by a cry.” — Elm
• “It is so much safer not to feel, than to let the world touch me.”

• “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” —  The Bell Jar
• “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.” —  The Bell Jar
• “I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. 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.”
• “But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.” —  The Bell Jar
• “I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” — Elm

• “I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.” —  The Bell Jar
• “I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”
• “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.” — The Bell Jar
• “I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely”
• “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.'” — The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Life

• “I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.” — The Unabridged Journals of 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.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? I have never seen a thing so clear.” — Three Women
• “The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.” — The Moon and the Yew Tree
• “Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.” — The Collected Poems

• “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” — The Bell Jar
• “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.” — Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts
• “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.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.”
• “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Death

• “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it.” — Lady Lazarus
• “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.” — The Bell Jar
• “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.”
• “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 on hour more of sleep and live.”
• “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” — Lady Lazarus

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Love

• “How frail the human heart must be — a mirrored pool of thought.” — Mirror
• “When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “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.”
• “We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
• “Kiss me and you will see how important I am.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• “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.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”
• “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.”

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Womanhood

• “Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.” — Lady Lazarus
• “There is a charge
  
  For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
  For the hearing of my heart—
  It really goes.
  
  And there is a charge, a very large charge,
  For a word or a touch,
  Or a bit of blood
  
  Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. — Lady Lazarus
• “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day. Spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.” — Letters Home

• I want, I think, to be omniscient… I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God.” Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but to what extent? I am I.” — Letters Home
• “My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security and what a man is is a fool and what a woman is is a fool if she thinks she can ever get it.”
• “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.” — The Bell Jar
• “If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
  You leave the same impression
  Of something beautiful, but annihilating.” — The Rival

Sylvia Plath Quotes About Writing

• “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “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.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

• “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.” — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
• “Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”
• “The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.”
• “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 remember that as I was writing a poem on ‘Snow’ when I was eight, I said aloud, I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.”
• “Didn’t you know I’m going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don’t feel badly, I didn’t either!”
• “Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.”

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