If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic...
SYLVIA PLATH I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled.
SYLVIA PLATH There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize sudd...
SYLVIA PLATH I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.
SYLVIA PLATH What I want back is what I was.
SYLVIA PLATH I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every sto...
SYLVIA PLATH Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
SYLVIA PLATH How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.
SYLVIA PLATH It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing nega...
SYLVIA PLATH If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed.
SYLVIA PLATH You know, bad people, I've never seen bad people have angels.
SYLVIA BROWNE No water, no life. No blue, no green.
SYLVIA EARLE The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses...
SYLVIA PLATH I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round a...
SYLVIA PLATH dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I ...
SYLVIA PLATH Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of...
SYLVIA PLATH I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost lik...
SYLVIA PLATH It's not uncommon for men to show up at my book signings or to send me emails with their thought...
SYLVIA DAY Rainbows apologize for angry skies.
SYLVIA VOIROL The emancipation of today displays itself mainly in cigarettes and shorts. There is even a reaction ...
SYLVIA PANKHURST But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion
SYLVIA PLATH I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an ...
SYLVIA PLATH What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve...
SYLVIA PLATH I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the m...
SYLVIA PLATH For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
SYLVIA PLATH I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.
SYLVIA PLATH Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling,...
SYLVIA PLATH Invest in yourself, in your education. There's nothing better.
SYLVIA PORTER I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middl...
SYLVIA PLATH I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and ...
SYLVIA PLATH I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I...
SYLVIA PLATH I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they die...
SYLVIA PLATH How we need another soul to cling to.
SYLVIA PLATH I talk to God but the sky is empty.
SYLVIA PLATH I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.
SYLVIA PLATH I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no m...
SYLVIA PLATH Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physi...
SYLVIA PLATH God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" ...
SYLVIA PLATH And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I h...
SYLVIA PLATH Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out o...
SYLVIA PLATH Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting...
SYLVIA PLATH I woke to the sound of rain.
SYLVIA PLATH Is there no way out of the mind?
SYLVIA PLATH The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
SYLVIA PLATH How frail the human heart must be --a mirrored pool of thought...
SYLVIA PLATH I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
SYLVIA PLATH Widow. The word consumes itself.
SYLVIA PLATH If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as ...
SYLVIA PLATH The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm
SYLVIA PLATH The average family exists only on paper and its average budget is a fiction, invented by statistici...
SYLVIA PORTER I am a citizen of the world.
SYLVIA BEACH Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
SYLVIA PLATH If I tried to describe my personality, I'd start to gush about living by the ocean half my life ...
SYLVIA PLATH Every woman adores a Fascist.
SYLVIA PLATH I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to re...
SYLVIA PLATH I felt proud that the baby's first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of...
SYLVIA PLATH I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and ...
SYLVIA PLATH I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it...
SYLVIA EARLE Ocean acidification - the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is turning the oceans increas...
SYLVIA EARLE I am a victim of introspection.
SYLVIA PLATH I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the ...
SYLVIA EARLE For a time, I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids. They seemed as logical and possi...
SYLVIA PLATH We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.
SYLVIA EARLE I remember that as I was writing a poem on 'Snow' when I was eight, I said aloud, 'I wis...
SYLVIA PLATH Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small spac...
SYLVIA PLATH I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed ove...
SYLVIA PLATH Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.
SYLVIA PLATH The more painful it is, tragically, the more you do learn, though, that's the good part.
SYLVIA BROWNE I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
SYLVIA PLATH When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.
SYLVIA PLATH Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? B...
SYLVIA EARLE People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructi...
SYLVIA EARLE A ghost is someone who hasn't made it - in other words, who died, and they don't know they&#...
SYLVIA BROWNE I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join th...
SYLVIA PLATH The only thing I was trying to portray was serenity. Also, innocence, vulnerability and elegance.
SYLVIA KRISTEL I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience poss...
SYLVIA PLATH I make a big pot of pasta with vegetables, and I stretch it out for the week.
SYLVIA KRISTEL Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English...
SYLVIA PLATH And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the...
SYLVIA PLATH The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it.
SYLVIA PLATH I do a lot of stuff. I mean, you know, charity work.
SYLVIA BROWNE I couldn't imagine that I'd ever fall in love again like I had with Gideon. For better or worse, he ...
SYLVIA DAY We fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of 'The Young American Couple'...
SYLVIA PLATH Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass s...
SYLVIA PLATH Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
SYLVIA PLATH The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
SYLVIA PLATH A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self...
SYLVIA PLATH I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the poi...
SYLVIA PLATH Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primit...
SYLVIA PLATH Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I ha...
SYLVIA PLATH I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have...
SYLVIA PLATH Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and ei...
SYLVIA PLATH Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to b...
SYLVIA PLATH How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your ...
SYLVIA PLATH I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself...
SYLVIA PLATH Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty toge...
SYLVIA PLATH I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every sto...
SYLVIA PLATH I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.
SYLVIA PLATH I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I a...
SYLVIA PLATH I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
SYLVIA PLATH I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know ...
SYLVIA PLATH Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my...
SYLVIA PLATH I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
SYLVIA PLATH And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at ...
SYLVIA PLATH let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
SYLVIA PLATH I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can ...
SYLVIA PLATH In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five...
SYLVIA PLATH The Arctic is a place that historically, during all preceding human history, has largely been an icy...
SYLVIA EARLE With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matte...
SYLVIA EARLE My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the A...
SYLVIA PLATH My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the a...
SYLVIA PLATH Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem...
SYLVIA PLATH The best scientists and explorers have the attributes of kids! They ask question and have a sense of...
SYLVIA EARLE For heaven's sake, when you see the enemy attacking, you pick up the pitchfork, and you enlist e...
SYLVIA EARLE 'Green' issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links...
SYLVIA EARLE Humans are the only creatures with the ability to dive deep in the sea, fly high in the sky, send in...
SYLVIA EARLE The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a cha...
SYLVIA EARLE For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what ...
SYLVIA EARLE We have been far too aggressive about extracting ocean wildlife, not appreciating that there are lim...
SYLVIA EARLE What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off fro...
SYLVIA PLATH Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when...
SYLVIA PLATH There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH The sudden release of five million barrels of oil, enormous quantities of methane and two million ga...
SYLVIA EARLE But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.
SYLVIA PLATH I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bo...
SYLVIA PLATH Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want ...
SYLVIA PLATH Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss...
SYLVIA EARLE Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some kri...
SYLVIA EARLE I want Books and Babies and Beef stews.
SYLVIA PLATH Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. ...
SYLVIA EARLE You put me through hell. On purpose. Made me suffer. And there’s no end in sight. I don’t know w...
SYLVIA DAY If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
SYLVIA PLATH A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.
SYLVIA PLATH Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for ...
SYLVIA PLATH I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
SYLVIA PLATH If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
SYLVIA PLATH I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every br...
SYLVIA PLATH There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surf...
SYLVIA PLATH If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowin...
SYLVIA PLATH When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I craw...
SYLVIA PLATH As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we c...
SYLVIA EARLE I'm not against extracting a modest amount of wildlife out of the ocean for human consumption, b...
SYLVIA EARLE I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of ...
SYLVIA KRISTEL It's so sad: anything that has to do with God, people want to dispel.
SYLVIA BROWNE By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, ...
SYLVIA EARLE We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
SYLVIA EARLE My mother was known as the 'bird lady' of the neighborhood. Anything injured, or any unusual...
SYLVIA EARLE I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets - tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide...
SYLVIA PLATH Our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corporate mandate to maximize shareholder value enc...
SYLVIA EARLE Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf ...
SYLVIA EARLE Mad Girl's Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and...
SYLVIA PLATH I just have to let the story go the way it needs to go and let them take the detours they want to ta...
SYLVIA DAY See, Heaven is not someplace on a disc in the sky floating around, it's right here amongst us.
SYLVIA BROWNE As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them di...
SYLVIA DAY Everyone dreams, but not everybody remembers their dreams because some people go into delta; they go...
SYLVIA BROWNE Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that...
SYLVIA PLATH I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue - rat...
SYLVIA PLATH I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. I am t...
SYLVIA PLATH People are cruel, and they will do anything.
SYLVIA BROWNRIGG If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as...
SYLVIA PLATH One of the soundest rules to remember when making forecasts in the field of economics is that what...
SYLVIA PORTER I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfo...
SYLVIA PANKHURST Some think it's holding on that makes one strong; sometimes it's letting go.
SYLVIA ROBINSON I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the t...
SYLVIA PLATH I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight d...
SYLVIA PLATH because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be...
SYLVIA PLATH I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry,...
SYLVIA PLATH There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
SYLVIA PLATH I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows fr...
SYLVIA PLATH What does one woman see in another than a man cannot see? Tenderness
SYLVIA PLATH I learned so much from other actors and they definitely didn't treat me like some sex bomb or bi...
SYLVIA KRISTEL Lions of the Deep.
SYLVIA EARLE Many of us ask what can I, as one person, do, but history shows us that everything good and bad star...
SYLVIA EARLE We've got to somehow stabilize our connection to nature so that 50 years from now, 500 years, 5,000 ...
SYLVIA EARLE We all have to take responsibility for the direction we are going. In our schools we are focusing on...
SYLVIA EARLE Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oc...
SYLVIA EARLE It is the worst of times but it is the best of times because we still have a chance.
SYLVIA EARLE You have to love it before you are moved to save it.
SYLVIA EARLE Our past, our present, and whatever remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now,
SYLVIA EARLE Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction th...
SYLVIA EARLE I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a ...
SYLVIA EARLE My master's degree was in English literature.
SYLVIA BROWNE I love music of all kinds, but there's no greater music than the sound of my grandchildren laugh...
SYLVIA EARLE When I write a scientific treatise, I might reach 100 people. When the 'National Geographic'...
SYLVIA EARLE I looked on my stomach and saw Frieda Rebecca, white as flour with the cream that covers new babies,...
SYLVIA PLATH Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into...
SYLVIA EARLE Self confidence for me is a fragile fleece.
SYLVIA KRISTEL Steve Jobs was Galileo in a past life. Discovery was instinctual for him.
SYLVIA BROWNE It's abundantly clear that we already have extraterrestrials living among us, and people are steppin...
SYLVIA BROWNE If you are an animal lover like me, the loss of a pet is as devastating as the loss of a person. Let...
SYLVIA BROWNE A spirit is, like, your mother, my dad, who've made it. They can come around, but they come around i...
SYLVIA BROWNE A ghost is someone who hasn't made it - in other words, who died, and they don't know they're dead. ...
SYLVIA BROWNE I was born this way, and I don't know how I do it. I can do it from a piece of paper. I can do it fr...
SYLVIA BROWNE The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call the...
SYLVIA BROWNE Animal totems, like the tiger, come from the Other Side to protect us while we are away from Home.
SYLVIA BROWNE Let me assure you that all of our pets, and animals of every kind will be with us for eternity on th...
SYLVIA BROWNE Every time I slip into the ocean, it's like going home.
SYLVIA EARLE As I was sitting there, the deejay was playing music and talking over the music, and the kids were g...
SYLVIA ROBINSON He's also a great storyteller. It should be a wonderful program. He has a way of making you want to ...
SYLVIA MOREL