Sylvia Plath - Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

Sylvia Plath
Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past?

Sylvia Plath
And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machinelike dictatorship, be it of industry, state or organization, all their lives long.

Sylvia Plath
We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

Sylvia Plath
I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.

Sylvia Plath
Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

Sylvia Plath
It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

Sylvia Plath
Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity.

Sylvia Plath
I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife.

Sylvia Plath
It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me.

Sylvia Plath
Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

Sylvia Plath
I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love.

Sylvia Plath
We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

Sylvia Plath
My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them.

Sylvia Plath
I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one.

Sylvia Plath
I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.

Sylvia Plath
Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man...

Sylvia Plath
I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool!

Sylvia Plath
The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

Sylvia Plath
Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation — he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing — I have Ted, will have children — but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him.

Sylvia Plath
It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

Sylvia Plath
Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

Sylvia Plath
The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.

Sylvia Plath
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.

Sylvia Plath
In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home.

Sylvia Plath