01c. 1947 ADIt is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
02c. 1947 ADI need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
03c. 1947 ADI never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
07c. 1947 ADI felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
09c. 1947 ADI began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
10c. 1947 ADI don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any moreSylvia Plath / quote ↗
11c. 1947 ADAugust rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
12c. 1947 ADWith 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. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
13c. 1947 ADI couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
14c. 1947 ADLife was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That's what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
15c. 1947 ADVery few people do this any more. It's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
16c. 1947 ADWind warns November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes, Web-winged and furious.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
19c. 1947 ADEverybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
20c. 1947 ADMother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
21c. 1947 ADPoetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
22c. 1947 ADIn London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.'Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
23c. 1947 ADIt seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
24c. 1947 ADWhen I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.Sylvia Plath / quote ↗
