chirysalis’s Reviews > The Bell Jar > Status Update

"Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.

But they were part of me. They were my landscape."

"'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 the bad dream.

A bad dream.

I remembered everything."

bloody hell

"I was beginning to resign myself.

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could."

i understand Esther's feeling all too well: feeling singled out and betrayed by someone who you considered a friend

wtf Esther?

fuck this

"My mother smiled. 'I knew my baby wasn't like that.'

I looked at her. 'Like what?'

Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.' She paused. 'I knew you'd decide to be all right again.'"

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ouch.

to say that i feel suffocated is an understatement

of course her writing peaks as soon as she descends to madness