Sylvia Plath - Journals of Sylvia Plath

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

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

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

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
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
Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

Sylvia Plath
You looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.

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

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

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
Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

Sylvia Plath
On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.

Sylvia Plath
Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing."

Sylvia Plath
That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.

Sylvia Plath
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more.

Sylvia Plath
So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

Sylvia Plath