“I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain.”

Sylvia Plath (1932- 1963) was a raw and fearless writer who opened up her inner life and personal struggles in poetry and prose. Tragically, after battles with severe depression and what was likely bipolar disorder, she took her own life at the age of 30. Yet the work she’s left behind has been a balm to so many who feel the grip of mental illness. Because she was so bold as to be so vulnerable, and did so in such a powerful and unflinching fashion, she holds a place as one of the greatest Dangerous Creatives of all time.

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”

“How frail the human heart must be – a mirrored pool of thought.”

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.”

“…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.”

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

“Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.”

“Out of the ash I rise with my read hair and eat men like air.”

“A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.”

“Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”

“After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal.”