The Bell Jar

From BillionQuotes

The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath, written under the pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas'. It depicted her breakdown through the summer and winter of 1953 and was semi-autobiographical.

• The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
• There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
• I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
• To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
• I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
• There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.
• If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
• What a man wants is an arrow into the future and what a woman is the place the arrow shoots off from.
• I am I am I am.
• The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.
• How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?