The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

• I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. (I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.)

• 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.

• I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

• 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.

• There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many f 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 in a week, I slump down just so far then I say: “I’ll go take a hot bath.”

• I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.

• People are made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people could remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

• (…) I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine year old.

• That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colors arrows from a Fourth of July Rocket.

• A keen wind that had been hiding itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot with out which the world would not exist. A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

• I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and saying “Ah!” in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.

• I knew I should be grateful to Mrs. Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made on scrap of difference to me, because where ever 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.

• I took up a silver knife and cracked off that cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.

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

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