The Bell Jar Quotes

#1. 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

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

Sylvia Plath

#3. I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.

Paul Westerberg

#4. We were talking about The Bell Jar, because we were sixteen, and we wanted to be depressed in New York.

Deborah Willis

#5. All will go to plan, Paige. You should not give up hope." He looked at the stage. "Hope is the one thing that might still save us all." I followed his gaze. The bell jar and the lifeless flowers stood on a covered plinth. "Hope for what?" "Change.

Samantha Shannon

#6. 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

#7. Someone once said that under the bell jar of compliance, the only thing that blooms is rage.

Jane Fonda

#8. I dare you to read a book this weekend! War and Peace? To Kill a Mocking Bird? Catcher in the Rye? The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? For Whom the Bell Tolls? As i lay Dying? Giovanni's Room? The Bell Jar? These books changed my life. #artforfreedom #rebelheart

Madonna Ciccone

#9. An unfree mind is just like a windmill inside the bell jar!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#10. 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

#11. I am made, crudely, for success.

Sylvia Plath

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Sylvia Plath

#18. I once met an economist who believed that everything was fungible for money, so I suggested he enclose himself in a large bell-jar with as much money as he wanted and see how long he lasted.

Amory Lovins

#19. She looked terrible, but very wise.

Sylvia Plath

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

Sylvia Plath

#21. I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

Sylvia Plath

#22. There was a beautiful time...

Sylvia Plath

#23. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

Sylvia Plath

#24. 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

#25. I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

Sylvia Plath

#26. Ready for a new life

Sylvia Plath

#27. Depression has descended like a bell jar around me.

Kristin Hannah

#28. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

Sylvia Plath

#29. Not only did Peeves break easily through the giant bell jar, showering an entire corridor with broken glass, he also escaped the trap armed with several cutlasses, crossbows, a blunderbuss and a miniature cannon.

J.K. Rowling

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

Sylvia Plath

#31. I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.

Sylvia Plath

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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