Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (27 October 1932 - 11 February 1963) American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist; first wife of Ted Hughes.

See: The Bell Jar

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...you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life... 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.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

...the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

If I didn't think I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

If they substituted the word "Lust" for "Love" in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

...why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"to learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there's butter on it."

I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek will get ignored and trampled.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

...Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God - or the universal woman-and-man - or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. 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.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

And who am I, God-that-I-don't-believe-in?
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Women in numbers have always disturbed me.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

How we need another soul to cling to.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

If god made man perfect, where did sickness, disease and death come from?
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

No man can ever grasp the whole impersonal neutrality of a universe.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

So what is reality? ...It could be the basic truth, the fact of matter, impersonal, neutral. Or it could be, for each individual, what that individual chooses to make of his corner of the world.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

...reality is relative, depending on what lens you look through.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

You are crucified by your own limitations.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Love is an illusion, but I would be willingly fall for it if I could believe in it.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I don't care any more about the handsome wealthy boys who come gingerly into the living room to take out the girl they thought would look nice in an evening cocktail dress...I said I wanted to go out with them to meet new people. I ask you, what logic is there in that? What guy you would like, would see the depths in a girl outwardly like all the other physical american queenies? So why go places with guys you can't talk to? You'll never meet a soul that way---not the sort you want to meet. Better to stay in your garret reading than to go from one party to another. Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won't stay with anyone for long. You've got to be able to talk. That's tough. But spend your nights learning, so you'll have something to say. Something the "attractive intelligent man" will want to listen to.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the extra person in the room.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.