The Bell Jar Quotes

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“...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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers -- goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“What do you have in mind after you graduate?"

What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate
school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write
books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had
these plans on the tip of my tongue.

"I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.”
― Sylvia Plath

“It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Se fizesse aquilo olhando no espelho, seria como assistir a outra pessoa, num livro ou numa peça. Mas a pessoa no espelho estava paralisada e era estúpida demais para fazer qualquer coisa.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Tudo o que eu já lera sobre gente maluca havia se fixado no meu cérebro, enquanto o resto evaporou.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Parecia haver fumaça saindo dos meus nervos, como aquela que saía das churrasqueiras e da estrada. Toda a paisagem — praia, encosta, mar e pedras — tremia diante dos meus olhos como a cortina de um palco.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It mightn't make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I like you.'
'That's tough, Joan,' I said, picking up my book. 'Because I don't like you. You make me puke, if you want to know.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“At the altar the coffin loomed in its snow pallor of flowers--the black shadow of something that wasn't there.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
― Sylvia Plath

“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 people would remember and repeat to themselves when they're unhappy or couldn't sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“the day i walked into physics class it was death”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Is everybody else sick too?' I asked with some hope.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own silly letters.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“She wants,' said Jay Cee wittily, 'to be everything.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say I'd thought they were made out of candy and hat eaten them.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar