Quotes from Sylvia Plath

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.

Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.

I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.

I dream too much, work too little.

I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

I guess they call it suicide, but I'm to full to swallow my pride I can't stand losing you The Police Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.

I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.

I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

I am a victim of introspection.

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

The day I went into physics class it was death.

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.

I could feel tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.