The Bell Jar Quotes

“There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder. “All right, Esther.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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, The Bell Jar

“I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Remember how you asked me where would I like to live best, the country or the city?"
"And you said..."
"And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn’t. He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had, and that’s intuition.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“There I went again, building p a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few posy nothings.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“TB is like living with a bomb in your lungs. You just lie around very quietly hoping it won't go off”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It didn't seem to be summer any more. I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together, and the big white hotel towel I had dragged down with me lay under my head, numb as a snowdrift.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“أصابني الصمت بالكآبة، لم يكن صمت الصمت، كان صمتي أنا”
― سيلفيا بلاث, The Bell Jar

“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 wires. I counted one, two, three . . . nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn’t see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt purged and holy and ready for a new life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar: A Novel Classic

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The stones lay lumpish and cold under my bare feet. I thought longingly of the black shoes on the beach. A wave drew back, like a hand, then advanced and touched my foot.
The drench seemed to come off the sea floor itself,where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own light through the great polar cold. I saw sharks' teeth and whales' earbones littered about down like gravestone.
I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
A second wave collapsed over my feet, lipped with white froth, and the chill gripped my ankles with a mortal ache.
My flesh winched, in cowardice, from such a death.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Evde de karnımız doymuyor değildi ama büyükannem, pişirdiği ucuz et yemeklerinin daha ilk lokmasını ağzımıza götürürken, "Umarım beğenirsiniz, şunun yarım kilosuna tam kırk bir sent verdim," deme alışkanlığına sahipti, ben de o zaman bir pazar günü rostosu yerine madeni paraları yiyormuşum duygusuna kapılırdım.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Огледало

Аз съм сребърно и точно. Безпристрастно съм.
Каквото видя, гълтам го незабавно,
просто тъй, незамъглено от любов или ненавист.
Не съм жестоко - само честно ...

Сега съм езеро. Една жена, надвесена над мен, претърсва
пределите ми за това, което представлява.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. 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.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head,”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“حين لا ترتجي شيئاً من شخص ما، فإنك لن تشعر بالخيبة أبداً”
― سيلفيا بلاث, The Bell Jar

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“كان حريًا بي أن أكون في غمرة أزهى فترات حياتي”
― سيلفيا بلاث, The Bell Jar

“No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Remember how you asked me where I like to live best, the country or the city?”
                “And you said...”
                “And I said I wanted to live in the country and in the city both?”
                Buddy nodded.
                “And you,” I continued with a sudden force, “laughed and said I had the perfect setup of a true neurotic and that that question came from some questionnaire you’d had in psychology class that week?”
                Buddy’s smile dimmed.
                “Well, you were right. I am neurotic. I could never settle down in either the country or the city.”
                “You could live between them,” Buddy suggested helpfully. “Then you could go to the city sometimes and to the country sometimes.”
                “Well, what’s so neurotic about that?”
                Buddy didn’t answer.
                “Well?” I rapped out, thinking, You can’t coddle these sick people, it’s the worst thing for them, it’ll spoil them to bits.
                “Nothing,” Buddy said in a pale, still voice.
                “Neurotic, ha!” I let out a scornful laugh. “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Yaşamımın, öyküdeki yeşil incir ağacı gibi önümde dallanıp budaklandığını görüyordum. Her dalın ucunda tombul, mor bir incir gibi eşsiz bir gelecek beni çağırıyor, göz kırpıyordu. İncirlerden biri, bir eş, mutlu bir yuva ve çocuklardı. Bir başkası, ünlü bir ozan, öteki parlak bir profesör, biri şaşırtıcı editör Ee Gee, öbürü Avrupa, Afrika ve Güney Amerika, biri Constantin, Sokrates, Attila ve garip adları değişik meslekleri olan daha bir yığın aşık, bir başkasıysa Olimpiyat takım şampiyonu bir kadındı. Bu incirlerin üzerinde ve ötesinde, ne olduklarını pek çıkaramadığım daha bir sürü incir daha vardı.
Kendimi dalların çatallandığı noktada otururken görüyordum.
Ve incirlerden hangisini seçeceğime bir türlü karar veremediğim için açlıktan ölüyordum. Hepsini ayrı ayrı istiyordum incirlerin, ama birini seçmek ötekilerin hepsini kaybetmek demekti. Ve ben orada karar veremeden otururken incirler buruşup kararmaya başlıyor ve birer birer toprağa, ayaklarımın dibine düşüyorlardı.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar