Texts
The Woman Body (1)
The only woman's body I had studied, with ever-increasing apprehension, was the lame body of my mother, and I had felt pressed, threatened by that image, and still feared that it would suddenly impos...
The Young Girl (2)
When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scat...
The Second Sex
The Second Sex
Books Written by Men (3)
�I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all w...
Persuasion
Persuasion
The Loneliness a Woman Knows (4)
Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work,...
The Diary of Ana�s Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
The Diary of Ana�s Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
The Future is with Woman (5)
To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then ...
What I Love in a Woman (6)
It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify h...
The Joke
The Joke
The Real Beauty of the Women (7)
A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the on...
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Being Born a Woman Is an Awful Tragedy (8)
Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars�to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording�all is spo...
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Search
On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays