Sylvia Plath Quotes

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Sylvia Plath

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 27, 1932

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

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

Sylvia Plath

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Sylvia Plath

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.

Sylvia Plath

I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, funny little dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big, dark-blue eyes.

Sylvia Plath

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

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

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

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Sylvia Plath

I have a visual imagination.

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 am a victim of introspection.

Sylvia Plath

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

Sylvia Plath

What I want back is what I was.

Sylvia Plath

Every woman adores a Fascist.

Sylvia Plath