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.”
― 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 th I need this, I need
someone to pour myself into.”
“Writing, then, was a
substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for
my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of
experience.”
“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric
currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – whichever is running at the
moment dominates my life, floods it.”
“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.”
Wear your heart on your skin in this life.”
I remember that as I was writing a poem on ‘Snow’ when I was
eight, I said aloud, I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings
I have now when I am little, because when I grow up, I will know how to write,
but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.”
. “I
think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I
have.”
“A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair,
can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.”
“Is there no way out of the mind?”
If I tried to describe my personality, I’d start to gush
about living by the ocean half my life and being brought up on ‘Alice in
Wonderland’ and believing in magic for years and years.”
“I have the choice of being
constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad
by ricocheting in between.”
― 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. Before I
give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't
having any of those.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Can you understand? 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. But it is hard, and I
have so much - so very much to learn.”
“I like people too much or not
at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Perhaps some day I'll crawl
back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my
heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I have never found anybody who
could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back
as good as I give.”
― The Journals of Sylvia Plath
“That’s one of the reasons I
never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and
to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to
shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of
July rocket.”
― The Bell Jar
“What did my arms do before
they held you?”
―
“Life has been some combination
of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with
some hurtful self-questioning.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I want to taste and glory in
each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a
numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the
easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this
always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Yes, my consuming desire is to
mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of
a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I
am a girl, a female always supposedly 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. Yes, God, I want to talk to
everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to
travel west, to walk freely at night...”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”
― Letters Home
“I feel good with my husband: I
like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his
jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs
and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how
he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him
something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants
to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and
a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as
if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces,
doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of
them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any
more: I don't need to look around for anything.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Living with him is like being
told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever
met. I could live in its growing countries forever.”
― 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
“I want to write because I have
the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't
be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life
in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted
head.”
― The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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