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the bell jar

Book by Sylvia Plath · 50 quotes · Bell Jar, Felt, Ifs

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the bell jar Quotes

“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.”

MistakeProgressFoodYouthHumourSoupNaiveJapaneseInexperienceFinger Bowl
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“فکر می‌کردم زندگی مثل درخت انجیر است؛ هر شاخه‌اش راهی متفاوت، آینده‌ای متفاوت. اما وقتی به همه نگاه می‌کردم، نمی‌توانستم انتخاب کنم و انجیرها یکی‌یکی جلوی چشمم خشک می‌شدند و می‌افتادند.”

NovelSylvia PlathرمانAmerican Writersسیلویا پلاتنویسندگان آمریکا
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“I lay, rapt and naked, on Irwin's rough blanket, waiting for the miraculous change to make itself felt. But all I felt was a sharp, startlingly bad pain. […] Then the stories of blood-stained bridal sheets and capsules of red ink bestowed on already deflowered brides floated back to me. I wondered how much I would bleed, and lay down, nursing the towel. It occurred to me that the blood was my answer. I couldn't possibly be a virgin any more. I smiled into the dark. I felt part of a great tradition.”

BloodSheetsBleedingVirginityBrideBlood StainLosing VirginityTowelDarnkess
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“Dodo Conway was a Catholic who had gone to Barnard and then married an architect who had gone to Columbia and was also a Catholic. They had a big, rambling house up the street from us, set behind a morbid façade of pine trees, and surrounded by scooters, tricycles, doll carriages, toy fire trucks, baseball bat, badminton nets, croquet wickets, hamster cages and cocker spaniel puppies--the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.”

Childhood
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“You say you want more sleeping pills?" "Yes." "But the ones I gave you last week are very strong." "They don't work any more." […] "What seems to be the matter?" Teresa said then. "I can't sleep. I can't read." I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off. I turned my hands palm up. "I think," Teresa tore off a white slip from her prescription pad and wrote down a name and address, "you'd better see another doctor I know. He'll be able to help you more than I can." I peered at the writing, but I couldn't read it. "Doctor Gordon," Teresa said. "He's a psychiatrist.”

StrongZombiePillsPsychiatrySleepingDoctorCan T SleepCan T Read
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“Of course, you have another year at college yet,' Jay Cee went on a little more mildly. 'What do you have in mind after you graduate?' What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. 'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that's been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham. 'I really don't know.”

MiseryGraduationBad Faith
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“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, another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, ... I wanted each and everyone 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.”

Decision MakingDilemmasTime Pressure
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“Later Buddy told me the woman was on a drug that would make her forget she'd had any pain and that hen 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. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, hen all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”

Maternity
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“Também lembrei de Buddy Williard dizendo com uma voz sinistra e sabichona que depois que tivéssemos filhos eu me sentiria diferente e não mais teria vontade de escrever poemas. E me ocorreu que talvez fosse verdade aquela história de que casar e ter filhos era como passar por uma lavagem cerebral, e que depois eu que você ficava inerte feito um escravo num pequeno estado totalitário.”

FeminismoFeminist Literature
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“It was the day after Christmas and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. 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.”

ChristmasSylvia PlathThe Bell JarSeasonal Depression
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“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.”

PureCleanBathingPurificationPurification Of The HeartRefreshedTaking Care Of YourselfHot BathBaptism Of The Spirit
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“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 a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line. I thought it would be the way I'd feel if I ever visited Europe. I'd come home, and if I looked closely into the mirror I'd be able to make out a little white Alp at the back of my eye. Now I thought that if I looked into the mirror tomorrow I'd see a doll-size Constantin sitting in my eye and smiling out at me.”

ChangeSleeping With Somebody
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“There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of 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 for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I’ll go take a hot bath.' I meditate in the bath.The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck. I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I’ve stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs, too: the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I remember the shapes and sizes of the water taps and the different sorts of soap holders. I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.”

Hot BathsBathBathtubTub
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“I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. I thought I would spend the summer reading "Finnegan's Wake" and writing my thesis. Then I would be way ahead when college started at the end of September, and able to enjoy my last year instead of swotting away with no make up and stringy hair, on a diet of Benzedrine, the way most of the seniors taking honors did, until they finished their thesis. Then I thought I might put off college for a year and apprentice myself to a pottery maker. Or work my way to Germany and be a waitress, until I was bilingual. Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits. I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles, threaded together by the wires. I counted one, two, three.... nineteen telephone poles dangled in space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”

Wandering ThoughtsGap Year
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“I feigned sleep until my mother left for school, but even my eyelids didn't shut out the light. They hung the raw, red screen of their tiny vessels in front of me like a wound. I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.”

SleepDarknessBedWoundNot SleepingCan T SleepVessels
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“I hadn't slept for seven nights. My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.”

SleepSleepingEyes Wide OpenCan T Sleep
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