Sylvia Plath Quotes

Time is flying never to return.

Since fame is an illusion and death is in our future all we have is the next moment before we are swallowed into oblivion.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

Life is short, and, once somebody is gone, they're gone.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

I think we all lose in the end because we don't get to stay here forever.

There's no sense that you're there forever. No parent is there forever.

From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

Last forever!' Who hasn't prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

Life is not a theme park, and if it is, the theme is death.

I wonder if one of the penalties of growing older is that you become more and more conscious that nothing is very permanent.

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams...

The world's a bubble, and the life of man, Less than a span.

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

I feel like my body is borrowed and this life is very temporary.

The plain truth is we are going to die. Here I am, a teeny spec surrounded by boundless space and time, arguing with the whole of creation, shaking my fist, sputtering, growing even eloquent at times, and then-poof! I am gone. Swept off once and for all. I think that is very, very funny.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

Our lives ... are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on its business, and is gone.