Excerpts from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath:

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.

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I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person.

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When I consider the prolonged adolescence 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.

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How we need that security! How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

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What is it that makes one attract others?

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Lord, what will I be? Where will the careless conglomeration of environment, heredity and stimulus lead me?

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What avail are good looks? To grab temporary security?

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As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention.

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Such is the resiliency of man that he can become fascinated by ugliness which surrounds him everywhere and wish to transform it by his art into something clinging and haunting in it’s lovely desolation.

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How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived?

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Read widely of others experiences in thought and action – stretch to others even though it hurts and strains.

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Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way,

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Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long.

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There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.

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I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.

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Although the rain is neutral, although the rain is impersonal, it becomes for me a haunting and nostalgic sound.

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Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

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With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonymous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.

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Events, as one grows older, first stand out in relief, and then start whizzing by like a deck of cards.

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Victimized by sex is the human race. Animals, the fortunate lower beasts, go into heat. Then they are through with the thing, while we poor lustful humans, caged by mores, chained by circumstance, writhe and agonize with the appalling and demanding fire licking always at our loins.

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It is not a black-and-white choice or alternative like: “Either-I’m-victorious on-top-or-you-are.” It is only balance that I ask for. Not the continual subordination of one persons desires and interests to the continual advancement of another’s! That would be too grossly unfair.

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I think that a workable union should heighten the potentialities in both individuals.

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We all live in own dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal realities with tender and loving care. And my dream-world – how much more valid, how much nearer to the truth is it than that of these people?

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We all in this world need something to cling to for a center of calm.

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Nothing is more difficult than lashing a vagrant mind suddenly into long self-imposed stints of concentration.

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I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering. I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. “A passionate, fragmentary girl,” maybe?

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

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I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn’t speak.