LinaVer’s Reviews > The Bell Jar > Status Update

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing
way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write
poems any more. 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 numb as a slave in some. private, totalitarian state.

"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. (…) 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"

"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."