24 Evocative Sylvia Plath Quotes
Your curiosity in learning more about the bell jar quotes excites me. If you are open-minded, they may lift your spirit to a whole new level of enthusiasm and creativity rather than boring you.
As I mentioned before, I’m thrilled if you’re seeking for quotations to lift your spirits.
And after reading these Sylvia Plath quotes that turn the darkness into light, I can guarantee that you won’t grow bored.
Sylvia Plath is an American poet, novelist, and story writer. The protagonist of the book is Esther Greenwood, who is portrayed by Sylvia Plath.
The Bell Jar was first published in England in 1963. And unfortunately, she committed suicide that same year.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to exonerate her husband of this given that he continued editing her work after she passed away and held control of it. The outcome hardly matches what she had envisioned.
Due to the book’s themes of mental illness, suicide, and the plight of women, it has been contested and banned.
After reading about Esther Greenwood’s battle with mental illness, some people have asserted that it may encourage pupils to attempt suicide.
In addition to some of her poems, I have selected quotes from that book. All exhibit her artisan expertise.
Quotes From the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
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 to change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe thrilling letter after thrilling letter.
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was a 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.
If you expect nothing from somebody, you are never disappointed.
The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
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.
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, 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 Ee Gee, 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 lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. 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. 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.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
“Oh, sure you know,” the photographer said.
“She wants,” said Jay Cee wittily, “to be everything.”
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was a 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.
I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely, the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week.
I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
When I was nineteen, pureness was a 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. I thought a spectacular change would come over me the day I crossed the boundary line.
The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted to change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me because what they did, they would do anyway.
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.
But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.
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