Quotes from Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

I am made, crudely, for success.

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Everything in life is writable.

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'

What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

Every woman adores a Fascist.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

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

Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me.

We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

Widow. The word consumes itself.