Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther."
68 Quotes
"It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther."
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
"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."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I woke to the sound of rain."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. 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."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"She looked terrible, but very wise."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault."
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 the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
"Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl. The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutant I knew at college about dinner, that I learned what I had done."
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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