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

Experience Very Van

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

Sylvia Plath

Peace Art Took

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Sylvia Plath

Won Us Things

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

Life Imagination You

If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.

Sylvia Plath

You Thing Thin

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Sylvia Plath

Romantic You Will

Is there no way out of the mind?

Sylvia Plath

Way T Out

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

Sylvia Plath

Yes World T

Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

Sylvia Plath

Life Art Your

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

Sylvia Plath

Anger Wanting Want

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.

Sylvia Plath

Art You Yin

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

Men Life Experience

I am a victim of introspection.

Sylvia Plath

Victim Tim T

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

Sylvia Plath

Art Us Thought

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath

God Talk T

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

Sylvia Plath

Wisdom Life UN

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

Sylvia Plath

Poetry Try Top

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

Positive Mom Men

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

Future Woman T

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

Time Yin Wanting

That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth.

Sylvia Plath

Life Yin Years

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

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

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

Sylvia Plath

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Sylvia Plath

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

Sylvia Plath

I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.

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 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

How we need another soul to cling to.

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

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry.

Sylvia Plath

Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.

Sylvia Plath

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

Sylvia Plath

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath

What I want back is what I was.

Sylvia Plath

Widow. The word consumes itself.

Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Sylvia Plath

I am too pure for you or anyone.

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

Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.

Sylvia Plath

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.'

Sylvia Plath