The Bell Jar Quotes

I am I am I am.

I want to taste life.

Sometimes I feel like a figment of my own imagination.

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head, and the air was raucous with the sound of wings.

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 figleaf tree.

I felt as though I were sitting in the bottom of a well, utterly alone and separate from everything else.

I couldn’t afford to buy any books.

I am climbing to a new level of madness.

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.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

I tried to free one of them-it must have been a foot because a woman’s legs were under me, long and thin and dusty.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.

I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.

I also sort of remember a tree and a house twice.

A line of muddy footprints stretched from the porch to a white mitten hidden in the burn on Uncle George’s property.

I couldn’t help thinking that if only there were a yellow door or a red door to break up its front, the house would have been perfect.

I saw Johnny’s eyes go dark with the answers I knew he had been looking for.

I wasn’t quite sure how to put it, but I felt as though I had swallowed one of those luminous arrows that shoot your dishes and your hands.

I wanted to crawl under an enormous bed and sleep for three years. Instead, I wrapped the Pay-Less potoftorundulation in a couple of people’s ends.

I looked at a few books, sweet and tight, covered in clear, sexually repellent old book jackets.

I saw them pouring our their faces into cups and drinking of it, in red hats and purple mitten suits and anemone corolla.

I admired their tousled hair and the grimy, striped and witchlike shoes on their feet.

I was supposed to go to the gym to put on my shirt and tie.

The book smelled of chlorine, and the slightly worn edges burnt my ashen palms.

I felt like a hole in the air.

I think we should all have babies, she said suddenly.

I tried to see this and failed.

I cracked along the line and broke just like the egg.

I felt as though I were trembling on a cliff over lava.

I wrapped myself in white paper and floated in sea water.

The baby sailed off through the gaping window.

I watched her open her eyes like we little girls with our dolls. It seemed childishly guilty.

I simply forgot.

I stood on a cliff and peered over it into the sea.

I could no more picture what awaited me outside than my reflection in Aunt Tillie’s perfume-clear bottle could suddenly climb out and latch itself onto the winder.

The candle under my nose was only a mm of former greatness.

I ate a fabulous meal, though I hadn’t a clue what it tasted like.

I never knew I had such an appreciation for red tile roofs and rolling pastoral scenes.

I felt a momentary chill. Then I swept my arms in the autumn wind, and my clothes flapped and flared like a large ship in a cobwebby sea.

The wild blackberries across the field were as swollen as grapes and trees I walked under held perfect white blossoms.

When I stepped onto the ferry, I felt a brisk slap of sea air.

I admired the trees, slender-growing and graceful in their winter nakedness.

How’s everything in the bell jar?