Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) was an influential American poet and novelist, mostly known for her semi-autobiographical novel ‘The Bell Jar’, and for the vibrance and emotional power of her poetry. Her work explores topics such as identity, depression, and the role of women in society. Plath’s life was marked by periodic bouts of severe depression, and she committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. Despite her tragic end, she left a vast cache of powerful and evocative writing. Her words continue to inspire and resonate with readers the world over.
Here are twenty of Sylvia Plath’s most popular quotes:
Sylvia Plath Quotes
- “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 love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”
- “I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”
- “We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
- “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
- “How we need another soul to cling to.”
- “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.”
- “Love, how can you ever truly know someone else when you don’t even know yourself?”
- “Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”
- “If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”
- “Touch has a memory.”
- “I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married.”
- “I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
- “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 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.”
- “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
- “Is there no way out of the mind?”
- “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence.”
- “If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house. It’s clear to me that everything has its own voice.”
- “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 power of Sylvia Plath’s language and her acute understanding of human emotion give these quotes a timeless quality. Her words continue to inspire and connect with readers, offering solace, raising questions, and illuminating the complexity of being human.