Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar - 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.” (Pg 16)

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.” (Pg 44)

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.” (Pg 55)

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” (Pg 59)

“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 mantle with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.” (Pg 77)

“How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?” (Pg 121)

“My body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash.” (Pg 159)

“The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.” (Pg 160)

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” (Pg 161)

“I knew that Catholics thought killing yourself was an awful sin. But perhaps, if this was so, they might have a good way to persuade me out of it.” (Pg 164)

“No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.” (Pg 164)

“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died.” (Pg 202)

“I remembered everything…Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.” (Pg 237)