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Quotes from The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath

1932–1963 United States

← All quotes by Sylvia Plath

21 quotes

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

The Bell Jar (1963)

What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

The Bell Jar (1963)

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.

The Bell Jar (1963)

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

The Bell Jar (1963)

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

The Bell Jar (1963)

I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.

The Bell Jar (1963)

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

The Bell Jar (1963)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

The Bell Jar (1963)

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.

The Bell Jar (1963)

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

The Bell Jar (1963)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

The Bell Jar (1963)

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.

The Bell Jar (1963)

How did I know that someday — at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere — the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

The Bell Jar (1963)

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

The Bell Jar (1963)

They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.

The Bell Jar (1963)

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

The Bell Jar (1963)

Then he just stood there in front of me and I kept on staring at him. The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

The Bell Jar (1963)

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.

The Bell Jar (1963)

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

The Bell Jar (1963)

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 some private, totalitarian state.

The Bell Jar (1963)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Sylvia Plath (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.