A Journal of the Journals of Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

Work redeems. Work saves. Baked a lemon meringue pie, cooled lemon custard & crust on cold bathroom windowsill, stirring in black night & stars.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

I think this book ricochets between the feminine burbling I hate and the posed cynicism I would shun. One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often hideously unflattering. I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.

--Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

I am now dressed in my red Christmas shirt with its subtle pattern of paisley black, green and gray foliage, and my very subtle smoky green skirt, deep gray-green, like a military color. I feel better for dressing: that Yeats poem comes to mind. The one about our restlessness: always longing for the next, the different season, our longing being the longing for the tomb.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?

--Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

Life is so only-once, so single-chancish! It all depends on your arranging and synchronising it so that when opportunity knocks you're right there waiting with your hand on the doorknob.

Sylvia Plath (Happy birthday)

[sylviaplathjournal]

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

It goes by, and whatever dream you use to dope up the pains and the hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You've only got so long to live. You're getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it's hot.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

The ways to hell on earth are easy, and one can always cross out hell and scribble in heaven. So much sweeter that way.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

And just for the record, consider all the potential "friends" we slaughter off in war, just because they are arbitrarily labeled "enemy."

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

We know a thing by its opposite corollary: hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

You God, whom I invoke without belief, only I can choose, and only I am responsible. (Oh, the grimness of atheism!)

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?

Sylvia Plath

[sylviaplathjournal]

The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run--and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow.

Sylvia Plath