Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Sylvia Plath
-
“Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.”
-
“I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.”
-
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”
-
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”
-
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at once 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.”
-
“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”
-
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
-
“Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.”
-
“The blood jet is poetry / There is no stopping it.”
-
“A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook. / It can talk, talk, talk ... / My boy, it's your last resort. / Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.”
-
“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”
-
“The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.”
-
“Love set you going like a fat gold watch. / The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry / Took its place among the elements.”
-
“Is there no way out of the mind?”
-
“The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak. / He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it.”
-
“It is a terrible thing / To be so open: it is as if my heart / Put on a face and walked into the world ...”
-
“You ask me why I spend my life writing? / Do I find entertainment? / Is it worthwhile? / Above all, does it pay? / If not, then, is there a reason? / I write only because / There is a voice within me / That will not be still.”
-
“I like people, but to learn about one individual always appeals to me more than anything.”
-
“My love for you is more / Athletic than a verb ...”
-
“The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.”
-
“The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.”
-
“... although this is the one man in the world for me, although I am using every fiber of my being to love him, even so, I am true to the essence of myself, and I know who that self is ...”
-
“All is learning, discovering, and speaking in a strong voice out of the heart of sorrow and joy.”
-
“Every day one has to earn the name of 'writer' over again, with much wrestling.”
-
“If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred.”
-
“Ted and I realize the fatality is to stop writing. We would go on, daily, writing a few pages of drivel until the juice came back, rather than stop, because the inertia built up is terrible to conquer. So, for our 'health' we write at least two hours a day.”
-
“I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing ...”
-
“The wonderful thing about these stories is that I can do them by perspiration, not inspiration — so I can work on them while Frieda is playing in the room ...”
-
“It's incredible to think that carpets can create a state of mind, but I am so suggestible to colors and textures that I'm sure a red carpet would keep me forever optimistic ...”
-
“... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' — read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it.”
Sylvia Plath, U.S. poet, writer
(1932 - 1963)