It's a crime how many overlooked authors are in American literature. Due to this tragic fact, only a number of readers can recognize the more famous Sylvia Plath quotes. Never heard of her? Not a strange thing to admit. Her poems and novel works are full of pessimism and realism. Hence the reason why she gets overlooked.
Before dwelling on the quotes themselves, it might be worth learning more about who Sylvia Plath was as a person and how special her creative abilities and style were.
If you want to understand Sylvia Plath's writing, you have to understand the life that she had. Plath had a life full of ups and many downs. Many of them stemmed from the fact that she was diagnosed with depression. She suffered from clinical depression for a very long time and had to undergo several electroconvulsive therapies throughout her life, all of which added to her problems.
Sylvia Plath is known for her confessional poetry style of writing poems. This type of poetry focuses more on the personal experiences of a poet. Plath is hailed as one of the best poets of this style, and it's clear why — her poems can evoke both grim and happy emotions. With around 445 poems, each one of them ranges in emotional impact.
One of her more memorable works might be the 1963 novel The Bell Jar. Quotes from The Bell Jar reveal what the book is about — Sylvia Plath's depression. Through these phrases we see how she handled it, what she learned from her experience, and how she thought that other people perceived her. Some quotes are rather pessimistic, but you can also find sayings that ooze a certain kind of positivity too.
To shine more light on her work, you might want to read up on some of her work below. Make sure to upvote The Bell Jar quotes that you liked the most. On the other hand, if you have anything to share about this American poet, do so in the comments below.
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“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“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,
“Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world.” — Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I have room in me for love. And for ever so many little lives.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water.” — Sylvia Plath
“I have often fought, fought and won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.” ― Sylvia Plath
“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
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery — air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I'll go take a hot bath.’” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled ‘enemy’?”– Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction — every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”– Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”– Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“The woman is perfected, her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment.” — Sylvia Plath 'Edge'
“Woman is but an engine of ecstasy, a mimic of the earth from the ends of her curled hair to her red-lacquered nails” — Sylvia Plath
“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
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“Of course, I didn't believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn't have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.” – 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.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Because wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“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'
“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I must be lean and write and make worlds besides this to live in.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“‘If you love her,’ I said, ‘you'll love somebody else someday.’” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“He was always saying how his mother said, ‘What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from,’ until it made me tired.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“How we need another soul to cling to.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.” — Sylvia Plath, 'Crossing the Water'
“I have such a damned puritanical conscience that it flays me like briars when I feel I've done wrong or haven't demanded enough of myself.” ― Sylvia Plath
“I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.” ― Sylvia Plath
“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.” ― Sylvia Plath
“I am learning how to compromise the wild dream ideals and the necessary realities without such screaming pain.” ― Sylvia Plath,
“The future is what matters because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present.” ― 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'
“I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“All the heat and fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“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 one hour more of sleep and live.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any s*x organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Yes, I want the world's praise, money, and love, and am furious with anyone... getting ahead of me.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
This quote is not correct! The correct version reads: "Yes, I want the world's praise, money & love, and am furious with anyone, especially with anyone I know or has had a similar experience, getting ahead of me."
“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes, and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was a shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“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'
“I have always been extremely fond of the definition of death which says it is: inaccessibility to experience.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted to him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, ‘It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one,’ and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Bell Jar'
“I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.” – Sylvia Plath, 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
“Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.” — Sylvia Plath, 'Lady Lazarus'
