The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

– Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want

But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many …?

– of what? We’re still nothing but

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.

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. –

gorgeous

Tonight, for a moment, all was at peace inside. I came out of the house-across-the-street a little before twelve, sick with unfulfilled longing, alone, self-reviling.

the two sentences feel so different yet work so well together

Of you, by you, for you. God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust? –

And the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”

to be cut off before he gets a chance … it kind of gets you. –

in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any

a little. 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. Maybe I need a man. One sure thing, I haven’t met him yet

tract. If they substituted the word “Lust” for “Love” in the popular songs it would come nearer

I said. “I have room in me for love, and for ever so many

Eddie, I thought. How ironic. You are a dream; I hope

till we are dead.” He has no home; he is unhappy. I could be the source of his joy, the refuge of his life. And I can only pass on. Something

I let him kiss me. The evening had been lovely, complete. I had been alone more that I could have been

From now on when a boy starts telling me about his lost loves I am going to run in the opposite direction screaming loudly. It is a bad sign.

girlyy that is a whole ass red flag

The future is what matters – because one never reaches it, but always stays in the

Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life.

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

I have just completed my third English theme: “Character is Fate.” If I had to hazard three words to sum up my philosophy of life, I’d choose those.

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self – – like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion.

I won’t try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter “Did you have a nice vacation?” “Oh, yes, and you?” I’ll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down.

animal warmth penetrates regardless of sensibilities and arbitrary mental barricades.

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity.

– I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love

same

“You know, it’s too bad you don’t get to know people in a crowd, like this. So often you never do more than find out where your date lives.”

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m 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 don’t believe in God as a kind father in the sky. I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.

you ok gurl?

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

Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking.

I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.

to express what I am, I must have a standard of life, a jumping-off place, a technique – to make arbitrary and temporary organization of my own personal and pathetic little chaos.

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way, the Spartan way – and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity!