The 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 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.

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.

God, let me think clearly and brightly; let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences, let me someday see who I am.

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

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 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.

Be stoic when necessary and write-you have seen a lot, felt deeply, and your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful-WRITE.

I have often fought, fought & won, not perfection, but an acceptance of myself as having a right to live on my own human, fallible terms.

I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak

You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again.

I justified the mess I made of life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it;

I would like to write a symbolic allegory about a person who would not assert her will and communicate with others, but who always believed she was unaccepted, and apart.

have so many merry little pots bubbling away in the fire of my enthusiasm: Myron, future trips, modern poetry, Yeats, Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal—even if rejections are immanent), spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential.

I am learning how to compromise the wild dream ideals and the necessary realities without such screaming pain.

I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water…

So much for self-love: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.

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.

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. 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. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter—for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.…

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity.

Write about the cow, Mrs. Spaulding's heavy eyelids, the smell of vanilla flavoring in a brown bottle. That's where the magic mountains begin.

What is more wonderful than to be a virgin, clean and sound and young, on such a night? ... (being raped.)

Yes, there is joy, fulfilment and companionship- but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...

Vamos encarar: Estou apavorada e paralisada. Para começar, creio, temo por mim... o primeiro anseio ancestral pela sobrevivência. Chegou a tal ponto que vivo cada momento com terrível intensidade. Na noite passada, voltando de carro de Boston, deitei-me no banco de trás e deixei que as luzes coloridas viessem a mim, a música do rádio, o reflexo do rapaz que dirigia. Tudo isso fluía por mim com uma pontada de dor gritante... lembre-se, lembre-se, isto é o momento, este momento, este momento. Viva-o, sinta-o, agarre-se a ele. Quero tomar consciência profunda de tudo que considerava favas contadas. Quando a gente sente que aquilo pode ser o adeus, a pancada é mais intensa. Preciso ter algo. Quero parar tudo, a monumental farsa grotesca inteira, antes que seja tarde demais. Mas escrever poemas e cartas não parece facilitar muito as coisas. Os grande homens são todos surdos.

This loneliness will blur and diminish, no doubt, when tomorrow I plunge again into classes, into the necessity of studying for exams. But now, that false purpose is lifted and I am spinning in a temporary vacuum. At home I rested and played, here, where I work, the routine is momentarily suspended and I am lost.

For weeks I have been obsessed by the idea of him, recalling again and again the apparent intellectual companionship indicated by our one meeting, our few subsequent letters. I thought how hideous it would be if I never saw him again, never got to know him in reality, as I began to know him. I like talking about him, discussing him with other people.