When it comes to writing about life and love, very few have done it as well as Sylvia Plath. Plath basically defined the art of what is known as confessional poetry. Plath battled with depression and eventually took her own life, but not before writing some of the greatest poetry in American literature. Her most famous collections were The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. Plath was also awarded the Pulitzer prize posthumously in 1982 for The Collected Poems. Plath truly had a way with words that still resonates all these years later. Below is a collection of some of her greatest lines.
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“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. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? 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.”
“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”
“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
“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.”
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
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“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
“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
“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.”
“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
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“Is there no way out of the mind?”
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
“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.”
“I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”
“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
“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.”
“How we need another soul to cling to.”
