Bell Jar Quotes

“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
― 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

“There was a beautiful time...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I don't know how long I kept at it...
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Ready for a new life”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I don't see what women see in other women, I told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, Tenderness. That shut me up.”
― Sylvia Plath

“We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
...
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Facevo collezione di uomini con nomi interessanti.”
― Sylvia Plath, La campana di vetro

“è come sollevara una campana di vetro posta sopra una comunità dove tutto funziona come un meccanismo oliato, e vedere i minuscoli, indaffarati abitanti arrestarsi di colpo, boccheggiare, gonfiarsi e librarsi nell'aflusso ( anzi, nel deflusso) della rarefatta atmosfera della norma: poveri esserini spaventati che agitano le braccia impotenti nell'aria indecisa. è così che ci sente a liberarsi dalla routine.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“What was there about us, in Belize [asylum], so different from the girls playing bridge and gossiping and studying in college to which I would return? Those girls, too, sat under bell jars of a sort.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
― Sylvia Plath

“The sound of the cicada only served to
underline the enormous silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I knew what was about to happen. I knew I was going to cry. It’s not even about sadness—it’s about vulnerability. Seeing into a person’s soul, even for a moment, is just too much. It’s like the convex meniscus Sylvia Plath describes in The Bell Jar—the water that clings to the sides of the glass before one tiny pulse causes it to overflow.”
― Jennifer Rieger, Burning Sage