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 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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“What did my arms do before they held you?”

“I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.”

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free.”

“Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

and I eat men like air.”