“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 liv...”
Work
"Published in their entirety for the first time, Sylvia Plath's journals provide a portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the twentieth century. Faithfully transcribed from the twenty-three journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath includes two journals that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, unsealed just before his death in 1998.". "A heavily abridged edition of Plath's diaries was published in 1982. Roughly two-thirds of this new unabridged edition is material that has never before been made public, revealing more fully the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced her demons. With its haunting, vibrant, and brutally honest prose, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work."--BOOK JACKET.
Quotes
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Sylvia Plath
Canonical work source
“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 liv...”
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
“I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.”
“let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences”
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”
“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
“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 impo...”
“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...”
“Is anyone anywhere happy?”
“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.”
“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk,...”
“All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reali...”
“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”
“Saturday morning, and I am at the old game of catching time between my fingers as it is running, forever running, away.”
“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel ca...”
“God, who am I?”
“How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am j...”
“I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.”
“I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.”
“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.”
“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...”
“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
“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...”
“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 i...”