The Bell Jar Quotes
"The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me."
"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."
"I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath."
"I tried to imagine what it would be like if I were Ee Gee, the famous editor, in an office full of potted rubber plants and African violets my secretary had to water each morning."
"I thought if you had to have all that pain anyway you might just as well stay awake."
"People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems."
"The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from."
"I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line."
"I felt I might have a baby, but that thought hung far and dim in the distance and didn’t trouble me at all."
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story."
"The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end."
"I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist."
"I buried my face in the pink velvet façade of Jay Cee’s loveseat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room."
"It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on."
"It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days."
"It’s a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangoes."
"You don’t have to dance. I’ll do the dancing."
"What seems to be the matter?" Teresa said then.
"What did I tell you?" Marco’s breath scorched my ear. "You’re a perfectly respectable dancer."
"I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow."
"I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die, and burning the worst."
"I wonder at what point in space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black."
"I realized my dallying had used up the better part of the morning."
"I wondered how long it had been since this particular square of soil had seen the sun."
"Cobwebs touched my face with the softness of moths."
"The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life."
"A cool wind rushed by. I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth."
"A chisel cracked down on my eye, and a slit of light opened, like a mouth or a wound."
"I began to think I must be in an underground chamber, lit by blinding lights."
"I felt the shape of a room around me, a big room with open windows."
"I had meant to cover my legs if anybody came in."
"I can’t sleep... I can’t read... I can’t eat."
"The Psychiatric Ward at the hospital was very small."
"I was starving, so I lifted the lid off the first bowl."
"If only something were wrong with my body it would be fine."
"Philomena Guinea’s black Cadillac eased through the tight, five o’clock traffic."
"I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."
"The journey over the bridge had unnerved me."
"I couldn’t understand why there should be so many of them."
"In a week, if I passed my interview, I would be leaving."