The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

What concerns me among multitudes and multitudes of other sad questions which one had better try to lure aside with parfaits and sunshine, is that

there is a certain great sorrow in me now, with as many facets as a fly’s eye, and I must give birth to this monstrosity before I am light again.

Why is it that I find it so difficult to accept the present moment,

whole as an apple, without cutting and hacking at it to find a purpose, or setting it up on a shelf with other apples to measure its worth or trying to pickle it in brine to preserve it, and crying to find it turns all brown and is no longer simply the lovely apple I was given in the morning?

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously...

I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a taj mahal in the future.

such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis,

for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.

I cry out to you. I want to write you, of my love, that absurd faith which keeps me chaste, so chaste, that all I have ever touched or said to others becomes only the rehearsal for you, and preserved only for this.

I haven’t looked into his eyes with the image he wants to see there.