Book detail: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book presents the extensive and unedited journals of Sylvia Plath, offering a candid and intimate look into her thoughts, experiences, and creative process throughout her life.
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“We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Your room is not your prison. You are.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of 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.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of 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.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Ho talmente riempito la mia riserva di giorni e maschere che adesso posso e devo passare gli anni a pescare, a tirar su mostri dagli occhi di perla, coriacei, squamosi e con barbe marine, sommersi da lungo tempo nel mar dei Sargassi della mia immaginazione.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“è come sollevara una campana di vetro posta sopra una comunità dove tutto funziona come un meccanismo oliato, e vedere i minuscoli, indaffarati abitanti arrestarsi di colpo, boccheggiare, gonfiarsi e librarsi nell'aflusso ( anzi, nel deflusso) della rarefatta atmosfera della norma: poveri esserini spaventati che agitano le braccia impotenti nell'aria indecisa. è così che ci sente a liberarsi dalla routine.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Then it hit me and I just blurted, 'I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“God, who am I?”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I shall doggedly work, wait and expect the minimum.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“How we need that security. 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.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate – – inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“what is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I am afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. and why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. and I am horribly limited.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of 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. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. 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 moments, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming "Traitor, sinner, imposter.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of 'parties' with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“You are a prisoner of sorts, and yet you have made yourself so.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Quando infine trovi qualcuno in cui senti di poter riversare la tua anima, ti blocchi di colpo davanti alle tue stesse parole - le hai tenute dentro così a lungo, contratte nel buio, che sono ormai sbiadite, brutte, banali, fiacche. Sì, c'è l'allegria, l'autorealizzazione, lo stare insieme: ma la solitudine dell'anima, nella sua spaventosa consapevolezza, è insopportabile, soverchiante.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“O, only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“an atmosphere of pain blood and pain and misery or staunch bitter rebellion of body- but no peace- no transfiguration- atmosphere of fear of physical pain - wincing from the knife- the loss of identity which is slavery to physical pain. Brutal, passionate flesh- marisse crucifix- pain smoothed way, identity smoothed away in pain- pure anguish human attempts at deciphering the riddle of pain- blood: florid and ornate-ugly, unredeeemed, ironic- waiting in corridors- cross of flesh x spirit- minor daily crosses-”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I need not to be more with others, but to be more and more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive — nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that "shaping" force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Very few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. 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.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Perchè mi sento libera di scriverle [le parole]? La mia identità prende forma, si modella - sento che i racconti fioriscono mentre leggo la raccolta del "New Yorker" - sì, quanto i tempi saranno maturi, io sarò tra loro - le poetesse, le autrici.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of 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. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago 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.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Where will the careless conglomeration of environment, heredity, and stimulus lead me? Someday I may say: It was of great significance that I sat and laughed at myself in a convertible with the rain coming down in rattling sheets on the canvas roof. It influenced my life that I did not find content immediately and easily—and now I am I because of that. It was inestimably important for me to look back at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the liquid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one—not at all.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Dziewicza strona, biała. Pierwsza skalana i odrzucona. Wszystkie te marzenia, obietnice: czekanie, aż będę mogła znowu pisać, a potem bolesny, sfuszerowany gwałt na pierwszej kartce.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“So I perversely circle the late stars, drowsier and drowsier, sleepily longing for something.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“(...) potem do widzenia, do widzenia moja miłości, do widzenia. Nie poczułaś żadnego cierpienia, co przecina wnętrzności jak nóż. Tylko znużenie, tęsknota za ramionami, w których można zasnąć, za objęciami, w których można by się skulić - i ich brak teraz.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Ah, what the hell do I care what they think—(damn much).”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Yes, I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Just a few notes on a night that marks another stage in growing up: this time there was no pain, no passion, no hurt. Inside me there was a core of self-possession. I have to hold on to this night, for in three days I'll be plunged into a new world, and there'll be confusion, dilemmas, as I fight to find the right equilibrium for myself again.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Odszedł, krocząc po chodniku sprężystym krokiem, niezależny, a ja stałam tak, jak mnie zostawił drżąc z miłości i tęsknoty, płacząc w ciemności. Trudno mi było zasnąć tamtej nocy.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Dziś jestem brzydka. Zupełnie nie wierzę już, że mogłabym być pociągająca dla mężczyzn. Kontakty towarzyskie w zaniku. Billa nie ma. (...) i nikt inny mi nie został. Zupełnie nikt.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“(...) kiedy pocałował mnie na pożegnanie, wiedziałam, że coś we mnie pożąda go, choć sama nie wiem dlaczego.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Tak bardzo potrzebujemy takiego bezpieczeństwa! Tak bardzo potrzebujemy bratniej duszy, do której można się przywiązać, ciała, które nas ogrzeje. Odpocząć i zaufać komuś, powierzyć swoją duszę w zaufaniu: potrzebuję kogoś, w kogo będę się mogła wlać, może mężczyzny.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath