The Journals of Sylvia Plath is a raw, unfiltered depths of one woman’s inner world. This personal reflections, fears, ambitions, and heartbreaks, Plath reveals something universal: the part of us that quietly wrestles with what it means to be human.

I can’t say too much about this book. Not because it lacks impact, but because it’s speechlessly good.

This diary speaks and it aches. It reaches into the tender places of your heart and lingers there, making you reflect on the questions we so often push aside. What do we truly want? Who are we when no one’s watching? It’s personal, yet eerily relatable, like she’s writing not just for herself, but for all of us.

My Favorite Bits

• “We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy..” —W.B. Yeats

• 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.

• With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. The 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. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing us real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me.

• If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if iI didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.

• .. 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. 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 (..) I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad.

• It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be.

• At any rate, I admit that I am not strong enough, or rich enough, or independent enough, to live up in actuality to my ideal standard.

• So what is reality? The definition is so arbitrary. It could be the basic truth, the fact of matter, impersonal, neutral. Or it could be, for each individual, what that individual chooses to make of his corner of the world. Looking at the world through the distorted colored lens of the individual, one might see only a few objects clearly. Even the neutral things seen would be colored by personal attitudes toward them. Reasoning deductively you would come to think, after picking up, squinting through, and putting down a number of these human lenses, that reality is relative, depending on what lens you look through.

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

• Is everything we do an attempt to choose between the lesser of two evils?

• You are crucified by your own limitations. Your blind choices cannot be changed; they are now irrevocable. You have had chances; you have not taken them. You are wallowing in original sin; your limitations. (..) You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. you are half-deliberately, half-desperately, cutting off your grip on creative life. (..) You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.

• It’s hopeless to “get life” if you don’t have notebooks.

• The only way to stop envying others is to have a self of joy. All creation is jammed in the selfish soul.

• To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them. What a gift of the gods.

• The most terrifying realization is that so many millions in the world would like to be in my place.

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Author: Sylvia Plath
Publication date: 1 January 1982
Number of pages: 400 pages

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