Portrait of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar, confessional poetry

Modern influential 105 sayings

Sayings by Sylvia Plath

I am a walking, talking, breathing exclamation point.

1956 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

I am a walking, talking, breathing ellipsis.

1956 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

I am a walking, talking, breathing semicolon.

1956 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

I am a walking, talking, breathing paragraph.

1956 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

1963 — From 'The Bell Jar'
Biblical Confirmed

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

1958 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

1959 — Journal entry
Life & Death Unverifiable

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates.

1955 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

I am a victim of introspection.

1956 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

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

1958 — Journal entry
Wisdom Unverifiable

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

1963 — From 'The Bell Jar'
Wisdom Unverifiable

I hate the world and almost everything in it.

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable

I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.

1963 — The Bell Jar
War & Violence Confirmed

Perhaps when we are old and ill, in a world of our own, we may feel as if we are of no account to anyone. But we are not old, not ill, and we have the world to live in.

1950s — Letters Home
General Unverifiable

I felt that I had been an idiot all my life, and that I was about to become an even bigger idiot.

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable

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 pick.

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable

The worst thing in the world is to be a woman. It is an awful thing to be a woman, especially if you are beautiful.

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable

I am a victim of the American way of life, and I am a victim of the American dream.

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable

I felt my life start to unravel, like a sweater I'd been knitting all my life, now coming undone stitch by stitch.

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable

Is there no way out of the mind?

1963 — The Bell Jar
General Unverifiable
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