The bell jar

Sylvia Plath (1963)

  • Chapter 1:
    • like a numb trolleybus
    • I thought having vodka plain must be all right. My dream was someday ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.
    • He kept staring at her the way people stare at the greate white macaw in the zoo, waiting for it to say something human.
    • I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn't taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower's sword and made me feel powerful and god-like.
    • I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew thing were all the time.
  • Chapter 2:
    • I slid into the self-service elevator and pushed the button for my floor. The doors folded shut like a noiselsss accordion. The my ears went funny, and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinked and used up I looked.
  • Chapter 3:
    • This poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antitheis of nature and art. I couldn't take my eyes off the pale stubby white fingers traveling back and forth from the poet's salad bowl to the poet's mouth with one dripping lettuce leaf to another. Nobody giggled or whispered rude remarks. The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.
    • promptitude
    • All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me. I was college correspondent for the town Cazette and editor of the literary magazine and secretary of Honor Board, which deals with academic and social offenses and punishments - a popular office - and I had a well-known woman poet and professor on the faculty championing me for graduate school at the biggest universitiews in the east, and promises of full scholarships all thw way, and now I was apprenticed to the best editor on an intellectual fashion magazine, and what did I do but balk and balk like a dull cart horse?
  • Chapter 4:
    • "Even the apostles were tentmakers."
    • embossed
    • When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies' Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain, It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I image they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a his that sent clouds of steam writing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.
    • lurid
    • tepid
  • Chapter 5:
    • tombstone teeth
    • "You better go and find Joan then," I said in a matter-of-fact voice. "I've got a date coming any minute and he won't like seeing me sitting around with you." "A date?" Buddy looked surprised. "Who is it?" "It's two," I said, "Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless." Buddy didn't say anything, so I said, "Those are their nicknames."
  • Chapter 6:
    • Buddy said he figured there must be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each time we met I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it. It was Buddy's idea. He always arranged our weekends so we'd never regret wasting our time in any way.
  • Chapter 7:
    • I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, I like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was EeGee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other loves with queer names and offbeat processions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crwq champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the croth of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one 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.
  • Chapter 8:
    • "Neurotic, ha!" I let out a scornful laugh. "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the samw 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."
    • mulishness
    • herringboned
  • Chapter 9:
    • dybbuk
    • mulish
  • Chapter 10:
    • simultaneous interpreter
    • At that rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the trouble was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?
    • curlicues
  • Chapter 11:
    • The reason I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly. I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
    • "Well, what did he say?" "He said he'll see me next week."
    • virile
  • Chapter 12:
    • But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. 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 13:
  • Chapter 14:
  • Chapter 15:
  • Chapter 16:
  • Chapter 17:
  • Chapter 18:
  • Chapter 19:
    • peremptory
    • myopic
  • Chapter 20:
    • sepulchral

Page last revised on: 2024-02-23