The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

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.

Girls like that make me sick. I’m so jealous I can’t speak.

He kept staring at her the way people stare at the great white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human.

every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour. Every

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

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.’

but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.

it wasn’t night and it wasn’t day,

I felt homesick for that sauce.

secret hope of spending the afternoon alone in Central Park

I would never marry him if he were the last man on earth.

fig-tree.

People were 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 would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.

Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she’d had any pain and that when she swore and groaned she really didn’t know what she was doing because she was in a kind of twilight sleep. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent.

Gray’s Anatomy

The only think I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have

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

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.

read Hebrew

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. 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. Constantin’s restaurant smelt of herbs and

Known in the Biblical sense, Eric said.

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.

Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone-structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.

‘I’m never going to get married.’

as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city’s mystery and magnificence might rub off on to me at last.

‘I am an observer,’

like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.

I thought, ‘It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one,’

‘It’s happening,’ I thought. ‘It’s happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen.’

I was my last night.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

The face in the mirror

the other two died in curious circumstances –

Children made me sick.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

‘My sentiments exactly.’

How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?

‘Doctor Gordon,’ Teresa said. ‘He’s a psychiatrist.’

What did I think was wrong? That made it sound as if nothing was really wrong, I only thought it was wrong.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

My trouble was I hated the sight of blood.

The figures around me weren’t people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.

‘I knew you’d decide to be all right again.’