Sylvia Plath - Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath
How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

Sylvia Plath
I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

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

Sylvia Plath
Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Sylvia Plath
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.

Sylvia Plath
How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?

Sylvia Plath
I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.

Sylvia Plath
What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness.

Sylvia Plath
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

Sylvia Plath
To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.

Sylvia Plath
I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

Sylvia Plath
God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

Sylvia Plath
There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds.

Sylvia Plath
With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start.

Sylvia Plath
What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid.

Sylvia Plath
I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak.

Sylvia Plath
And by the way, 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.

Sylvia Plath
Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.

Sylvia Plath
But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

Sylvia Plath
Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

Sylvia Plath
I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

Sylvia Plath
I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Sylvia Plath
I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.

Sylvia Plath
Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

Sylvia Plath
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Sylvia Plath
Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?

Sylvia Plath
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

Sylvia Plath
Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady... I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?

Sylvia Plath
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

Sylvia Plath