And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat.

— Sylvia Plath

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.

— Sylvia Plath

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.

— Sylvia Plath

And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

— Sylvia Plath

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

— Sylvia Plath

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

— Sylvia Plath

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

— Sylvia Plath

Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

— Sylvia Plath

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminist. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...

— Sylvia Plath

Between Sylvia and me there existed as between my own mother and me - a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times an unwelcome invasion of privacy (words from Aurelia Plath from the Introduction)

— Sylvia Plath