Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar Quotes

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

I woke to the sound of rain.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

She looked terrible, but very wise.

I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more

Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security, ’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

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

I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.

My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.