Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."

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

"God, who am I?"

"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 reality has led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward."

"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."

"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 have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content."

"Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."

"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."

"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."

"I desire the things that will destroy me in the end."

"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 to."

"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."

"But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good."

"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."