Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar Best Quotes & Sayings

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

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come. — Sylvia Plath

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said. — Sylvia Plath

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. — Sylvia Plath

Elaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother's waiting for something to happen.' [ ... ] I sat like that for about an hour, trying to think what would come next, and in my mind, the barefoot doll in her mother's old yellow nightgown sat and stared into space as well. — Sylvia Plath

Ready for a new life — Sylvia Plath

I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me. — Sylvia Plath

Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color - it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown ... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar. — Sylvia Plath

Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose. — Sylvia Plath

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. — Sylvia Plath

I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together. — Sylvia Plath

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it. — Sylvia Plath

We'll take up where we left off, Esther', she had said, with her sweet martyr's smile. 'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.'
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything. — Sylvia Plath

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you. — Sylvia Plath

I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. — Sylvia Plath

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. — Sylvia Plath

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. — Sylvia Plath

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers
goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. 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.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat. — Sylvia Plath

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure. — Sylvia Plath

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey. — Sylvia Plath

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir. — Sylvia Plath

I didn't know what I was doing in New York. — Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am already. — Arlaina Tibensky

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. — Sylvia Plath

I am made, crudely, for success. — Sylvia Plath

We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape. — Sylvia Plath

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar. — Sylvia Plath

She looked terrible, but very wise. — Sylvia Plath

There was a beautiful time... — Sylvia Plath

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars,
the trees and flowers were strewing
their cool odos. There was no moon. — Sylvia Plath