Sylvia Plath

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

So much working, reading thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.

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.

We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'... security to us is in ourselves, and no job, not even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work and hard, hard work, which is Spartan in many ways.

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn't trust life insurance salesmen.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

I don’t know whether I am extremely sensitive, or whether life is unbearable.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

I am half agony, half hope.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

The oldest, shortest words— "yes" and "no"— are those which require the most thought.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one.