Abbie > Abbie's Quotes

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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 Bell Jar

“If you love her," I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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

“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 a totalitarian state.”
― sylvia plath, The Bell Jar

“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

“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, The Bell Jar

“Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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 Bell Jar

“Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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, The Bell Jar

“What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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, The Bell Jar

“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”
― 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

“I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.”
― 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