92 Sylvia Plath Quotes: Best Lines from The Bell Jar & Ariel

From the famous fig-tree passage to the searing verses of “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” these 92 sylvia plath quotes trace a brilliant, unflinching voice — on identity, creativity, love, and despair. Learn more about her life and work at Wikipedia’s Sylvia Plath biography.

Sylvia Plath Quotes from The Bell Jar

1. I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
   — The Bell Jar
2. I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
   — The Bell Jar
3. 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.
   — The Bell Jar
4. 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.
   — The Bell Jar
5. 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.
   — The Bell Jar
6. The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
   — The Bell Jar
7. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
   — The Bell Jar
8. I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery — air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
   — The Bell Jar
9. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade.
   — The Bell Jar
10. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
    — The Bell Jar
11. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
    — The Bell Jar
12. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
    — The Bell Jar
13. My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
    — The Bell Jar
14. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
    — The Bell Jar
15. 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.
    — The Bell Jar
16. What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
    — The Bell Jar
17. I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow.
    — The Bell Jar
18. A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.
    — The Bell Jar
19. “If you love her,” I said, “you’ll love somebody else someday.”
    — The Bell Jar
20. I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.
    — The Bell Jar
21. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
    — The Bell Jar
22. 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.
    — The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath Quotes from Her Poems

1. Out of the ash
   I rise with my red hair
   And I eat men like air.
   — “Lady Lazarus,” Ariel
2. 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.
   — “Lady Lazarus,” Ariel
3. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
   I lift my lids and all is born again.
   — “Mad Girl’s Love Song”
4. You do not do, you do not do
   Any more, black shoe
   In which I have lived like a foot
   For thirty years, poor and white,
   Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
   — “Daddy,” Ariel
5. Every woman adores a Fascist,
   The boot in the face, the brute
   Brute heart of a brute like you.
   — “Daddy,” Ariel
6. The moon has nothing to be sad about,
   Staring from her hood of bone.
   — “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
7. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
   — “Tulips,” Ariel
8. I am too pure for you or anyone.
   — “Fever 103°,” Ariel
9. The woman is perfected.
   Her dead
   Body wears the smile of accomplishment.
   — “Edge,” Ariel
10. Stasis in darkness.
    Then the substanceless blue
    Pour of tor and distances.
    — “Ariel,” Ariel
11. Love is a shadow.
    How you lie and cry after it.
    — “Elm”
12. Is it the sea you hear in me,
    Its dissatisfactions?
    — “Elm”
13. The blood jet is poetry,
    There is no stopping it.
    — “Kindness,” Ariel
14. A living doll, everywhere you look.
    It can sew, it can cook,
    It can talk, talk, talk.
    — “The Applicant,” Ariel
15. I am inhabited by a cry.
    Nightly it flaps out
    Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
    — “The Night Dances”
16. I write only because
    There is a voice within me
    That will not be still
    — Sylvia Plath
17. Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
    Before we fell, like Icarus, undone
    — “Doom of the Exiles”
18. Is there no way out of the mind?
    — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes from The Unabridged Journals

1. 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.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
2. What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
3. Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
4. What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
5. Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
6. The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
7. 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.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
8. I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
9. I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
10. Is anyone anywhere happy?
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
11. I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
12. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
13. 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.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
14. I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, mimicking nothingness.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
15. With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
16. Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars — to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
17. I must be lean and write and make worlds besides this to live in.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
18. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
19. I have room in me for love. And for ever so many little lives.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
20. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
21. 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.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
22. Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
23. I too want to be important. By being different.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
24. 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.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
25. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
26. 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.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
27. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run — and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
28. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
29. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
30. 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.
    — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes on Love and Life

1. How frail the human heart must be — a mirrored pool of thought.
   — Letters Home
2. 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
3. I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain.
   — Sylvia Plath
4. There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.
   — Sylvia Plath
5. I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole… I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
6. So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
7. 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?
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
8. If they substituted the word ‘Lust’ for ‘Love’ in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
9. Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older?
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
10. I hadn’t, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks.
    — The Bell Jar

Short Sylvia Plath Quotes

1. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
   — The Bell Jar
2. I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
   — The Bell Jar
3. Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
   — “The Munich Mannequins,” Ariel
4. I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
5. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
   — The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
6. Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it.
   — The Bell Jar
7. I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering, blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
   — “You’re”
8. I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
   — “Mirror”
9. Whatever I see I swallow immediately.
   — “Mirror”
10. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
    — “Mirror”
11. I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root.
    — “Elm”
12. This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
    — “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Sylvia Plath’s most famous quote?

Her most quoted line is “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” from The Bell Jar, followed closely by the fig-tree passage about choices and the opening of “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash I rise with my red hair.”

What book are most Sylvia Plath quotes from?

The largest share of her widely quoted lines comes from The Bell Jar (1963), her semi-autobiographical novel, and from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, which collect her private diaries. Her poetry collection Ariel supplies the most famous verse quotations.

What does the fig tree quote mean?

In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood sees her life as a fig tree where every branch holds a possible future — husband, poet, professor, traveler — and she starves, unable to choose. It has become the definitive literary image of choice paralysis.

Are all quotes attributed to Sylvia Plath genuine?

The lines in this collection are drawn from her published books, poems, journals, and letters. A few very short lines circulate online without a precise source; those are presented here under her name only when they are widely documented as hers.

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