The Bell Jar quotes
Chapter 8: Then I heard him whisper, ...
'How would you like to be Mrs Buddy Willard?' I had an awful impulse to laugh.
Chapter 17: Joan would be at...
Belsize. Joan with her physics books and her golf clubs and her badminton rackets and her breathy voice. Joan, marking the gulf between me and the nearly well ones.
Chapter 11: Then I thought, how could this Doctor ...
Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a christmas card.
Chapter 15: I walked back to the lounge. ....
I couldn't understand what these people were doing, playing badminton and golf. They mustn't be really sick at all, to do that.
Chapter 16: I hated these visits, because...
I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.
Chapter 11: Yes, a WAC station,...
I remember now. I was a doctor for the lot, before I was sent overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls.
Chapter 17: I gathered all my news of...
Joan into a little, bitter heap, though I received it with surface gladness. Joan was the beaming double of my old best self, specially designed to follow and torment me.
Chapter 3: This book was written by Mr...
Manzi to explain physics to college girls, and if it worked on us he would try to have it published.
Chapter 12: Every time I tried to concentrate...
My mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.
Chapter 4: I wished I had a mother like Jay Cee. ...
Then I'd know what to do. My own mother wasn't much help.
Chapter 5: There I went again, building up...
a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
Chapter 15: Wherever I sat -- on the deck of...
a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok -- I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
Chapter 18: 'What does a woman see...
a woman that she can't see in a man?' Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, 'Tenderness.'
Chapter 13: After a discouraging time of walking...
about with the silk cord dangling from my neck like a yellow cat's tail and finding no place to fasten it, I sat on the edge of my mother's bed and tried pulling the cord tight
Chapter 14: Then the chisel struck ...
again, and the light leapt into my head, and through the thick, warm, furry dark, a voice cried, 'Mother!'
Chapter 13: Then I saw that my body had...
all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash.
Chapter 7: So one Saturday Eric... (Quizlet is a prude)
and a few of his classmates took a bus into the nearest city and visited a notorious friendhouse. Eric's friend hadn't even taken off her dress.
Chapter 6: All I'd heard about, really, was how fine...
and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for. So I didn't really see the harm in a anything Buddy would think up to do.
Chapter 4: I felt purged
and holy and ready for a new life.
Chapter 14: The boy looked at me...
as if I were some exciting new zoo animal and he was about to burst out laughing.
Chapter 13: The silence drew off,
baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.
Chapter 9: I felt limp and ...
betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on."
Chapter 5: 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.
Chapter 15: Valerie pushed aside her...
black bang and indicated two pale marks, one on either side of her forehead, as if at some time she had started to sprout horns, but cut them off.
Chapter 15: The journey over the...
bridge had unnerved me. I had missed a perfectly good chance. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink.
Chapter 6: I heard the scissors...
close on the woman's skin like cloth and the blood began to run down - a fierce, bright red."
Chapter 13: Then I remembered that I had never...
cried for my father's death. My mother hadn't cried either.
Chapter 1: I felt very still and...
empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo
Chapter 12: What bothered me was that...
everything about the house seemed normal, although I knew it must be chock-full of crazy people.
Chapter 9: Then he threw himself...
face down as if he would grind his body through me and into the mud. 'It's happening,' I thought. 'It's happening. If I just lie here and do nothing it will happen.'
Chapter 13: Cobwebs touched my ...
face with the softness of moths. Wrapping my black coat round me like my own sweet shadow, I unscrewed the bottle of pills
Chapter 18: All the heat and...
fear purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head.
Chapter 2: It's like watching Paris...
from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier
Chapter 5: I felt dull and flat and...
full of shattered visions. I had imagined Buddy would fall in love with me that week-end and that I wouldn't have to worry about what I was doing on any more Saturday nights the rest of the year.
Chapter 10: All through June the writing ...
had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve, and a body in a white blouse and green skirt plummet into the gap.
Chapter 11: Then nobody would know...
had thrown up a scholarship at a big eastern women's college and mucked a month in New York and refused a perfectly solid medical student for a husband who would one day be a member of the A.M.A. and earn pots of money.
Chapter 15: I was surprised to...
have a woman. I didn't think they had woman psychiatrists.
Chapter 7: 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.
Chapter 2: The longer I lay there in the clear...
hot water the purer I felt, and when I stepped out at last and wrapped myself in one of the big, soft, white, hotel bath towels I felt pure and sweet as a new baby.
Chapter 5: It was there I found out...
how he had fooled me all those years and what a hypocrite he was. I found out on the day we saw the baby born.
Chapter 7: I felt like a racehorse...
in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street
Chapter 10: Buddy wrote that he was probably falling...
in love with a nurse who also had TB, but his mother had rented a cottage in the Adirondacks for the month of July, and if I came along with her, he might well find his feeling for the nurse was a mere infatuation.
Chapter 13: I wondered at what point...
in space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.
Chapter 7: 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
Chapter 1: I felt myself melting...
into the shadows like the negative of a person i'd never seen before in my life
Chapter 18: But then it seemed to me...
it would be a step, placing him, renouncing him, in spite of the fact that I had nobody -- telling him there was no simultaneous interpreter, nobody, but that he was the wrong one, that I had stopped hanging on.
Chapter 6: And I thought how convenient ...
it would be now I didn't have to announce to everybody at college I had broken off with Buddy and start the boring business of blind dates all over again.
Chapter 12: 'Ah!' Doctor Gordon's face...
lighted with a slow, almost tropical smile. 'They had a WAC station up there didn't they, during the war?
Chapter 18: Then I put down the knife and ...
looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.
Chapter 6: 'What a man wants is a ...
mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, 'What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from,' until it made me tired.
Chapter 10: The piggish noise irritated...
me, and for a while it seemed to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it to silence between my hands.
Chapter 10: I hadn't, at the last ...
moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular
Chapter 6: 'You oughtn't to see this,' Will...
muttered in my ear. 'You'll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn't let women watch. It'll be the end of the human race.'
Chapter 9: The hand round ...
my arm tightened. 'Ouch!' Marco removed his hand. I looked down at my arm. A thumb-print purpled into view.
Chapter 12: My mother smiled. 'I knew...
my baby wasn't like that.' I looked at her. 'Like what?' 'Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.'
Chapter 11: I began to feel pleased at ...
my cleverness. I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the time while he thought he was so smart.
Chapter 17: Through the slits of ...
my eyes, which I didn't dare open too far, lest the full view strike me dead, I saw the high bed with its white, drumtight sheet, and the machine behind the bed, and the masked person
Chapter 9: Piece by piece, I fed...
my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the grey scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.
Chapter 8: The thought I might kill...
myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
Chapter 12: When I opened my mouth...
no words came out, my eyes only widened and stared at the smiling familiar face that floated before me like a plate full of assurances.
Chapter 7: My mother kept telling me...
nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her.
Chapter 9: 'Give us a smile' At last,
obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up. 'Hey,' the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, ' you look like you're going to cry.' I couldn't stop.
Chapter 7: A million years...
of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.
Chapter 18: I looked at Joan. In spite ...
of the creepy feeling, and in spite of my old, ingrained dislike, Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.
Chapter 3: I had been unmasked...
only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true
Chapter 14: I can't see,' I ...
said. A cheery voice spoke out of the dark. 'There are lots of blind people in the world. You'll marry a nice blind man someday.'
Chapter 1: In the company of...
several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion
Chapter 8: A dispassionate white sun...
shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
Chapter 2: 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
Chapter 4: The floor seemed wonderfully...
solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and couldn't fall no further.
Chapter 1: Goggle-eyed headlines ...
staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway.
Chapter 12: 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.
Chapter 7: I began to think maybe it was true...
that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.
Chapter 16: And when Mrs. Bannister held ...
the cup to my lips, I fanned the hot milk out on my tongue as it went down, tasting it luxuriously, the way a baby tastes its mother.
Chapter 7: The trouble was, I hated...
the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letter.
Chapter 18: I told Doctor Nolan about...
the married woman lawyer and her Defence of Chastity. Doctor Nolan waited until I was finished. Then she burst out laughing. 'Propaganda!' she said, and scribbled the name and address of this doctor on a prescription pad.
Chapter 7: And I knew that in spite of all...
the roses and kisses a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard's kitchen mat.
Chapter 8: His father simply couldn't stand...
the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will.
Chapter 6: I thought it sounded just like...
the sort of drug a man would invent. ... in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain as waiting to open up and shut her in again.
Chapter 8: I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, ...
the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past. ... as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly.
Chapter 18: 'What I hate is...
the thought of being under a man's thumb,' I had told Doctor Nolan. 'A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line.'
Chapter 17: 'You're all right, it's...
those boobies at the state place that worry me off my feet.'
Chapter 12: I knew if the dead girl's eyes were to be...
thumbed wide, they would look out at me with the same dead, black, vacant expression as they eyes in the snapshot.
Chapter 2:I would have nothing at all...
to do with her. Deep down, I would be loyal to Betsy and her innocent friends, it was Betsy I resembled at heart.
Chapter 3: It was a joke because I never intended...
to get married, and even if I did, my grandfather couldn't have afforded enough caviar
Chapter 7: 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 and arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
Chapter 12: Then something bent down and...
took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world, Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.
Chapter 17: They had their shock...
treatments while we breakfasted in our rooms, and then they came into the lounge, quiet and extinguished, led like children by the nurses, and ate their breakfasts there.
Chapter 12: 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.
Chapter 11: He was Nordic and ...
virginal. Now I was simple minded it seemed I attracted clean, handsome people.
Chapter 16: 'I hate her,' I said, and...
waited for the blow to fall. But Doctor Nolan only smiled at me as if something had pleased her very, very much, and said, 'I suppose you do.'
Chapter 4: Finally I could see the nice girl...
was going to end up with nice football hero and the sexy girls was going to end up with nobody
Chapter 6: The baby in the last bottle..
was the size of a normal baby and he seemed to be looking at me and smiling a little piggy smile. I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.
Chapter 4: The sickness rolled through me in great...
waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and the I would feel it rising up in me again.
Chapter 16: 'I read about you,' Joan...
went on. 'Not how they found you, but everything up to that, and I put all my money together and took the first plane to New York.' 'Why New York?' 'Oh, I thought it would be easier to kill myself in New York.'
Chapter 3: After Doreen left, I wondered...
why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should anymore. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
Chapter 3: If you do something incorrect at the table...
with a certain arrogance... you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up.
Chapter 9: I began to see why...
woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of power.
Chapter 13: The more hopeless ...
you were, the further away they hid you.
Chapter 2: 'Stick around, will...
you? I wouldn't have a chance if he tried anything funny. Did you see that muscle?' Doreen giggled.
