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11 Stunning Journal Entries From Sylvia Plath That Will Fill Your Head With Wonder

One of the worlds most renowned female writers inspires us with questions, with bold perceptions of the world, and with an unending curiosity for life. 
Bianca Sparacino
August 31, 2016
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“How we need another soul to cling to.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: 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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: 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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“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: Plath
“Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don't quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. 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.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath
“I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch one. But my honest self revolted at this, hated me for doing this.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath
Tagged: Plath