Sylvia Plath - Journals of Sylvia Plath

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I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Sylvia Plath
I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence...luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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