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Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath Quotes

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Famous Sylvia Plath Quotes

“I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.”

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Author:Sylvia Plath
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“I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.”

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Author:Sylvia Plath
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“I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can't understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I'm fascinated by this mastery of the practical.”

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Author:Sylvia Plath
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“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.”

IfsWayLifeWritingSelfLife IsImaginationEnemyCreativityDoubtWrittenSadnessFeminismWorstSadClassicGutsWriting AdviceBeing A WomanGood WritersWriters And WritingWorst EnemySelf-doubtWriting By WritersGreat WritingImprovisingOutgoingCreative LifeStory WritingWriting StoriesInspire CreativityCreativity And WritingArtists And CreativityReal TalkFamous WritersStory WritersWriting From Famous AuthorsWriting ShortShort Writing
Book:The Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”

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Book:the bell jar
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“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.”

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Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

LifeInspirationalWritingSelfBeautifulArtistFearEnemyCreativityCreativeDoubtWrittenWorstSelf ConfidencePersistenceGutsBe CreativeCreative WritingWriting AdviceCreative PeopleGood WritersWriters And WritingWorst EnemySelf-doubtCreative ArtWriting By WritersGreat WritingImprovisingOutgoingCreative ArtistsCreative IdeasCreativenessArt And CreativityIdeas And CreativityStory WritingWriting StoriesInspire CreativityConfidence BoostingCreativity And WritingArtists And CreativityBoost Your ConfidenceFamous WritersStory WritersCreative WritersWriting From Famous AuthorsArtists And WritersWriting ShortShort WritingOvercoming Doubt
Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.”

WayWritingTryingYearsAbleLyingEnergyGrowsGoes OnEdgesCoreMy WayDramaticNervesYellowCynicalLeisureSentimentalMy ThoughtsMistLiving OnBlacknessMake OutLooking DownWindySlimeLiving On The Edge
Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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“* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment.”

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Author:Sylvia Plath
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“So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping!”

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Author:Sylvia Plath
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“What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”

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Book:the bell jar
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“I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.”

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Book:The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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