Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)

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I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Sylvia Plath

I'm never going to get married." "You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind." "No. My mind's made up.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off.

Sylvia Plath

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.

Sylvia Plath

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at once and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.

Sylvia Plath

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

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could.

Sylvia Plath

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all.

Sylvia Plath

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

Sylvia Plath

Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

Sylvia Plath

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

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

Sylvia Plath

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

Sylvia Plath

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

Sylvia Plath

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

Sylvia Plath

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 some private, totalitarian state.

Sylvia Plath

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Sylvia Plath

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

Sylvia Plath

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.

Sylvia Plath

"I hate her," I said, and waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much and said, "I suppose you do."

Sylvia Plath

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.

Sylvia Plath

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world.

Sylvia Plath

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.

Sylvia Plath

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

Sylvia Plath

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.

Sylvia Plath