Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. – Sylvia Plath
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. – Sylvia Plath
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears. – Sylvia Plath
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. – 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. – Sylvia Plath
I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets – tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides. I collected a shiver of china bits, with borders of larkspur and birds or braids of daisies. No two patterns ever matched. – Sylvia Plath
Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions). – Sylvia Plath
I felt proud that the baby’s first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea. – Sylvia Plath
One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. – Sylvia Plath
For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possible to me as the brittle twig of a seahorse in the zoo aquarium or the skates lugged up on the lines of cursing Sunday fishermen – skates the shape of old pillowslips with the full, coy lips of women. – Sylvia Plath
I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef’s salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce. – Sylvia Plath
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. – Sylvia Plath
Dying is 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. – Sylvia Plath
I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. – Sylvia Plath
The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water – blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be – were enough to watch. – Sylvia Plath
There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive it, recreate it. – Sylvia Plath
I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. – Sylvia Plath
Didn’t you know I’m going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don’t feel badly, I didn’t either! – Sylvia Plath
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. – Sylvia Plath
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. – Sylvia Plath
I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham. – Sylvia Plath
If I tried to describe my personality, I’d start to gush about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and believing in magic for years and years. – Sylvia Plath
That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth. – Sylvia Plath
