The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

Around the middle of the glass there was painted a pink lasso with yellow polka dots. I drank to about an inch below the lasso and waited a bit, and when I went to take another sip, the drink was up to lasso-level again.

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig tree.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years 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 off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

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

I summoned my little chorus of voices.

I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.