Ennui Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe, designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she will still predict no perils left to conquer. Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard of, while blasé princesses indict tilts at terror as downright absurd. The beast in Jameson grove will never jump, compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;and when insouciant angels play God’s trump, while bored arena crowds for once look eager, hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

— Sylvia Plath

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

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

— Sylvia Plath

Fixed stars govern a life

— Sylvia Plath

For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

— Sylvia Plath

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.

— Sylvia Plath

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. 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. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

— Sylvia Plath

God, who am I?

— Sylvia Plath

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

— Sylvia Plath

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

— Sylvia Plath