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 Christmas
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. -Sylvia Plath Sad
But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion. -Sylvia Plath Wisdom
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 Poetry
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
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 Poetry
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
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 Imagination
I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives. -Sylvia Plath Poetry
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work. -Sylvia Plath Business
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 Car
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
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. -Sylvia Plath Faith
It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism. -Sylvia Plath Age
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 Space
When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels. -Sylvia Plath Learning
I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter. -Sylvia Plath Politics
