bubblegumwhore

42 Haunting Passages From The Journals Of Sylvia Plath To Read When Your Soul Is Adrift

From a woman who understood all too well what it means to be human.
Heidi Priebe
October 28, 2016
“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Naivety, Identity, Personality, Growing Up, lost
“Although the rain is neutral, although the rain is impersonal, it becomes for me a haunting and nostalgic sound.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Rain, Melancholy, Nostalgia, Rainy Day
“I dream too much, work too little.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Dream, Dreamer, Idealism, Work, INFP, ENFP
“God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: talking, Discussion, Deep Conversations, Conversations
“Suddenly I wonder, ‘Where is the girl that I was last year? Two years go? What would she think of me now?’”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Change, Personality, Growing, Losing Yourself, lost
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: insignificance, INFP, Fading Out, Growing, Middle Age, Type 4
“I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Awareness, Catastrophy
“I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Desire, Self-Destruction, Addiction
“Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Death And Life Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Life
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Wanting, Desire, Lust, Bleakness, Nihilism
“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 read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Life, Opportunity, ENFP, INFP, Identity
“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 into.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Love, Intimacy, Relationships, Souls, Soul Mate
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: ENFP, People, Conversation, Art
“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Happiness, Sadness, Moodiness
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Soul Mates
“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: People, Relationships
“I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Relationships, caring
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Heartbreak, Sorrow, Art, Writing, Creativity
“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Life, Excitment, Questioning
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Creativity, Self-Doubt
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Life, Living, Feeling, Love, Creativity, Being Open, ENFP
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Writing, Creativity, Life
“I do not love anybody except myself.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Love, Self-Love, Loneliness
“The danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Change, Loneliness, Moving On, lost
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Relationships, Imagination, Infatuation
“His body fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Love, Bodies, Touch, Intimacy, cuddling
“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Reading, Thinking, Living, Life, ENFP
“I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Dissatisfaction, Wanting More, Living, Life
“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Life, humanity, Bodies, Future, Past, Dreams, Memories
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Future, Past, Change, Memories