Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

• Don’t let thewicked city let you down.
• It’s comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
• If you expect nothing from someone you are never disappointed.
• What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security. What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
• Stranding me in the middle of a huge silence.
• The instructions slid through my head like water, and then I’d always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.
• I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
• I say 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.
• and think, dusty bottle-candles, that seemed for centuries to have wept their colored waxes red over blue over green in a fine, three-dimensional lace , cast a circle of light round each table where the faces floated, flushed and
  flamelike themselves.
• I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being
  able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
• I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved
  closer I immediately say he wouldn’t to at all.
  

That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married.

The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots
from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself,
like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

• Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It makes me go all sleepy and peaceful.
• I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
• and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noise that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.
• I didn’t really see why people should look at me.
  

Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.

• The air punched out my stomach.
  

All through June the writing course stretched before me like a bright safe bridge over the full gulf summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve.

• My mother saidthe cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
• The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still have to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
• I also hate people who ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like
  hell and expect you to say “Fine”.
• it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, 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.
• The air of the bell jar wadded round me
  and I couldn’t stir.
• The river water passed me by like an untouched drink.
• I was growing involved in spite of myself.
• I told him I believed in hell, and that
  certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
• I hated their visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away confounded.
• the beaming double of my old self, specially designed to follow me and torment me.
• I was beginning toresign myself. If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could.
• All the heat and fear purged itself. i felt surprisingly at peace. the bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. i was open to the circulating air.
• Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed wry, black image of my own.
• Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what i had been, and what i had been through, and carry on her separate but similar crisis under my nose.
• I was disappointed. i had thought i would have some revelation of specific evil.
• i am my own woman.

The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

• I couldn't possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dar. i felt part of the great tradition.
• To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything. Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of sorrow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.
• 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.
• A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-black only as the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth the psychic generation.