Sylvia Plath Quotes

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Sylvia Plath

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 27, 1932

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

Sylvia Plath

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

Sylvia Plath

Mountains terrify me - they just sit about; they are so proud.

Sylvia Plath

I am too pure for you or anyone.

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

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

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.

Sylvia Plath

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

Sylvia Plath

It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.

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

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.

Sylvia Plath

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

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

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

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

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

Sylvia Plath

I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.

Sylvia Plath

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

Sylvia Plath

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.'

Sylvia Plath

The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark evenings closing in mid-afternoon, and will try to lay in some physical comforts these months - the best insurance against gloominess for me.

Sylvia Plath