Sylvia Plath Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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

2. How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print? The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

3. 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

4. How we need that security. 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

5. I am not cruel —only truthful.

6. I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

7. I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

8. 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

9. 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. The Journals of Sylvia Plath

10. I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

11. I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more... The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

12. If I lived by the sea I would never be really sad. I get an immense sense of eternity and peace from the ocean. I can lose myself in staring at it hour after hour.--from a letter to Aurelia Plath, written c. July 1951 Letters of Volume I: 1940-1956

13. Is anyone anywhere happy? The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

14. Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

15. The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

16. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends. The Bell Jar

17. 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. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

18. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

19. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

20. I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962 Ariel

21. I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

22. I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Ariel

23. I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty of a garden bedAttracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,Unknowing I must soon unpetal.Compared with me, a tree is immortalAnd a flower-head not tall, but more startling,And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.Sometimes I think that when I am sleepingI must most perfectly resemble them--Thoughts gone dim.It is more natural to me, lying down.Then the sky and I are in open conversation,And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 The Collected Poems

24. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)--from "Mad Girl's Love Song: A Villanelle", written 1954

25. I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here. The Collected Poems

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

27. I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon's celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look's leashDangles the puppet-peopleWho, unaware how they dwindle,Laugh, kiss, get drunk,Nor guess that if I choose to blinkThey die.IWhen in good humour,Give grass its greenBlazon sky blue, and endow the sunWith gold;Yet, in my wintriest moods, I holdAbsolute powerTo boycott color and forbid any flowerTo be.IKnow you appearVivid at my side,Denying you sprang out of my head,Claiming you feelLove fiery enough to prove flesh real,Though it's quite clearAll your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,From me."Soliloquy of the Solipsist", 1956 The Collected Poems

28. Is it the sea you hear in me,Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962 Ariel

29. LADY LAZARUSI have done it again.One year in every tenI manage it--A sort of walking miracle, my skinBright as a Nazi lampshade,My right footA paperweight,My face a featureless, fineJew linen.Peel off the napkinO my enemy.Do I terrify?--The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?The sour breathWill vanish in a day.Soon, soon the fleshThe grave cave ate will beAt home on meAnd I a smiling woman.I am only thirty.And like the cat I have nine times to die.This is Number Three.What a trashTo annihilate each decade.What a million filaments.The peanut-crunching crowdShoves in to seeThem unwrap me hand and foot--The big strip tease.Gentlemen, ladiesThese are my handsMy knees.I may be skin and bone,Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.The first time it happened I was ten.It was an accident.The second time I meantTo last it out and not come back at all.I rocked shutAs a seashell.They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.DyingIs 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've a call.It's easy enough to do it in a cell.It's easy enough to do it and stay put.It's the theatricalComeback in broad dayTo the same place, the same face, the same bruteAmused shout:'A miracle!'That knocks me out.There is a chargeFor the eyeing of my scars, there is a chargeFor the hearing of my heart--It really goes.And there is a charge, a very large chargeFor a word or a touchOr a bit of bloodOr a piece of my hair or my clothes.So, so, Herr Doktor.So, Herr Enemy.I am your opus,I am your valuable,The pure gold babyThat melts to a shriek.I turn and burn.Do not think I underestimate your great concern.Ash, ash--You poke and stir.Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--A cake of soap, A wedding ring,A gold filling.Herr God, Herr LuciferBewareBeware.Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.-- written 23-29 October 1962 Ariel

30. Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it--from "Elm", written 19 April 1962 Ariel