Sylvia Plath

I am made, crudely, for success.

The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.

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

It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

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

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. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.