Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar (1963)

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Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

Sylvia Plath
This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself.

Sylvia Plath
I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

Sylvia Plath
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

Sylvia Plath
Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

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

Sylvia Plath
When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

Sylvia Plath
What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

Sylvia Plath
I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

Sylvia Plath