Ikigai Daily
StillnessQuote1,191 of 1,961

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

Literature

Why it matters

The idea in context

Authentic Plath, from her journals (published complete in 2000): the passage mourns abundance — “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.” It is not complaint but appetite: Plath's hunger to multiply herself through experience is the same force that powered the poems.

Türkçe

Aynı kart, başka bir dilde.

İstediğim tüm kitapları asla okuyamam; istediğim tüm insanlar asla olamam.
Sylvia Plath, Günlükler

Sahici Plath — günlüklerinden (tam metni 2000'de yayımlandı): Pasaj bolluğa yanar — “İstediğim bütün kitapları asla okuyamam; olmak istediğim bütün insanlar olamam, yaşamak istediğim bütün hayatları yaşayamam.” Bu şikâyet değil, iştahtır: Plath'in deneyim yoluyla çoğalma açlığı, şiirlerini besleyen kuvvetin ta kendisidir.

Source trail

Read beyond the card.

Background reading: Sylvia PlathAttribution and context are revised when stronger evidence appears. Corrections are welcome through the editorial page.
Open in the iPhone appEditorial method

Related cards

These cards share a subject or mode with the one above. The route is editorial, not personalised.

Q0108
StillnessLiterature

The rose's lover must endure the thorn.

A rose is beautiful because it is alive, and living things come with difficulty. The Turkish proverb is not a call to suffer pointlessly; it says mature love sees the whole reality, not only the pleasing part.

Turkish, Persian variants ProverbRead card
Q0118
StillnessLiterature

In every religion there is love, yet love has no religion.

This line is shared everywhere as Rumi, but it is not found in scholarly translations of the Masnavi or the Divan-e Shams — treat it as a modern saying in a Sufi spirit. The distinction it draws is real in Rumi's world, though: for the Sufi poets, love is the current beneath all traditions, and institutions are vessels it keeps overflowing.

RumiRead card
Q0120
StillnessLiterature

Don't you have a knife somewhere deep in your heart where love left?

The wording circulates under Bukowski's name without a dependable poem or book citation, so it remains an attribution. It does echo his harsher love poems, where tenderness is never prettified: love leaves a physical afterimage, and Bukowski wrote about that residue more honestly than almost anyone.

Charles BukowskiRead card
Next in the open archiveAnd by the way, everything in life is writable about.Q1236