Back when I had a Twitter account, I came across a tweet sharing one of the Sylvia Plath quotes. I got hooked somehow; it was not about just reading something you can relate to but rather something that put the darkest of your feelings you have inside into words.
Sylvia Plath feels like a twin flame. How we are so similar yet different. Her feelings and how she feels about things and how she puts these feelings into words. I read not only her words but I feel them,
Therefore, I have many of her words that I resonate with, and that is why I dedicated this post to her and her quotes.
If you wanna know more about Sylvia Plath regarding who she was and her life, check the following link: Sylvia Plath: Her life and career.
Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.”
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between…I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home
So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
sylvia plath, The Bell Jar
If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if I didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.
Sylvia Plath
At this rate,
I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day.
Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing and love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter – – – for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself…. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going – and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
If only I can find him… the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn’t I expect it in a man?
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
It always has to end, doesn’t it? We always have to separate.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. He was insistent, ‘But it doesn’t always have to be that way. We could be together some day for always.’ ‘Oh, no,’ I told him, wondering if he knew it was all over. ‘We keep running till we die. We separate, get further apart, till we are dead.’ He has no home; he is unhappy. I could be the source of his joy, the refuge of his life. And I can only pass on. Something in me wants more. I can’t rest. Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.
Sylvia Plath.
You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
So I am led to one or two choices! Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I’m any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH, EGOCENTRIC, JEALOUS, AND UNIMAGINATIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTHWHILE? Should I sublimate (my how we throw words around!) my selfishness in serving other people- through social or other such work? Would I then become more sensitive to other people and their problems? Would I be able to write honestly? Then of other beings besides a tall, introspective adolescent girl? I must be in contact with a wide variety of lives if I am not to become submerged in the routine of my own economic strata and class.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant – but this is no indication of the true worth of one’s total human identity: past, present and future!
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day, spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. I want, I think, to be omniscient.”
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home
For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
Tomorrow is another day toward death.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I am both worse and better than you thought.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently.
Sylvia Plath
What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination…. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.
Sylvia Plath
I think I’m in love with missing you more than I’m in love with you.
Sylvia Plath
God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts.
Sylvia Plath
I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath
I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.
Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts
Yet I liked him too much… way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
You felt no reality. Only a weariness, a longing for a shoulder to sleep on, a pair of arms to curl up in — and a lack of that now.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I don’t see what women see in other women, I told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, Tenderness. That shut me up.
Sylvia Plath
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
And there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
historians will say ‘We have a few documents to show how the common people lived at this time. Records lead us to believe that a majority were killed. But there were glorious men.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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.
Sylvia Plath
In the heart of the forest your image follows me.
Sylvia Plath
And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing.
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home
Anonymous young men with all-American bone structures.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I am a part of all that I have met.” To you, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something. There is nothing but that it will suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Through me transmuted.
Sylvia Plath
Our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Even in the days I feel the worst, I feel glad to be alive. To be a part of this journey called life. To be one of the lucky 7 billion. Why was I chosen to be here? I must have a meaning, right? There’s a big picture already painted of my life, my legacy, my happiness. I just have to trust in it.
Sylvia Plath, Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956
You’re still vulnerable, because you still don’t have faith in yourself, you talk a little fliply, a little too wisely, just to cover up so you won’t be accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or feminine tactics.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
And by the way, everything in life is writeable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The greatest threat to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath
You fool – you are afraid of being alone with your own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. Your room is not your prison. You are.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I don’t know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.
Sylvia Plath.
Waiting for the right wonderful person is so much more important than getting the outer comforts of marriage at an early age.
Sylvia Plath, Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1: 1940-1956
Always him. Damn, what is the matter with me? Is it because I want somebody to orient myself about that I’m drawn to him, or am I drawn to him because he is exactly the sort of person I want to orient myself about?
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
B. will be home, all mine, and I’ll be secure for a little. 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. Maybe I need a man. One sure thing, I haven’t met him yet…
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
A Better Resurrection
I have no wit, I have no words, no tears;
Sylvia Plath
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
A lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is like the falling leaf;
O Jesus, quicken me.
I am learning how to compromise the wild dream ideals and the necessary realities without such screaming pain.
Sylvia Plath
How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived?
Sylvia Plath
If you have come this far, let me know in the comments below, does she resonate with you too?
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