Quotes from Sylvia Plath

I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.'

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.

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal.

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.

That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

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.

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt)