The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.Will I never rest in sunlight again – slow, languid & golden with peace?.

I wanted to scream out in helpless fury at the hopeless inevitable going on of seconds, days and years.

That starts you feeling a little sorry.

Only a weariness, a longing for a shoulder to sleep on, a pair of arms to curl up in – and a lack of that now.

You felt no reality, no knife of sorrow cut your intestines to bits.

At the traditional age of sixteen, you found out that a kiss was not as distasteful as once imagined.

She screams and rapidly puts lipstick on her own lips.

Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God – or the universal woman-and-man – or anything much.

And you hate him because he has deprived you of that: walks and aloneness.

The perfect place to discuss god and life.

He has led you up behind the fraternity house to a clearing in the pines overlooking the city.

Perhaps that’s why I want to be everyone – so no one can blame me for being I.

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.

I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart.

And I sit here without identity: faceless.

Girls, girls everywhere, reading books.

When you’re young you’re so self-reliant.

I don’t see how people stand being old.

Fifteen-thousand years of what? We’re sill nothing like animals.

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…

God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can.

All is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.

Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man? Being a woman is my awful tragedy.

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams.

Any boy would deny that any gallant boy any gallant liar.

You don’t give a damn about me except physically.

I picked these excerpts very carefully some of these have happened to me, some are ideas I thought of but couldn’t put into words and some are just beautiful sentences I happened to highlight in my book but I can assure you that all of these are philosophical and eternally rational. It’s been only three days since I first laid my hands on The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and I have not finished reading it yet but I am already itching to share with you some of the lines I found incredibly relatable, mentally stimulating and even haunting at times. I myself have read her books and poems in various sources and I admit that it is difficult to choose only twenty-five quotes to include in this post because almost every line she has written can make a good one. Many of us know how much of a brilliant poet and writer Sylvia Plath is.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath