“I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water. I said to myself: “Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.” The longer I lay there in the clear hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft white hotel bath”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, “Do you know what a poem is, Esther?” “No, what?” I would say. “A piece of dust.” Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, “So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“By wiping out entire families, by inducing a reign of terror and by pitilessly repressing certain behaviors and practices that had come to be seen as unacceptable, the witch-hunts contributed to shaping the world we live in now.”
― In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
― In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial
“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. 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.” I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck. I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I’ve stretched out in.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“If Peter has learned one thing about human nature during all his years in hockey, it’s that almost everyone regards themselves as a good team player, but that very few indeed understand what that really means. It’s often said that human beings are pack animals, and that thought is so deeply embedded that hardly anyone is prepared to admit that many of us are actually really rubbish at being in groups. That we can’t cooperate, that we’re selfish, or, worst of all, that we’re the sort of people other people just don’t like. So we keep repeating: “I’m a good team player.” Until we believe it ourselves, without actually being prepared to pay the price.”
― Beartown
― Beartown
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The Mothers of North Arlington Book Club
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