The Bell Jar

I just finished reading 'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath which is in fact, quite sadly, her only novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it too as I found it easy to read and often relatable. I didn't find talk of suicide reletable but more the little things the character likes to point out, like that i thought maybe nobody else noticed them.

Or maybe that sounds a little pretentious.

Here are my favourite lines that I marked out anyway:

"I meditate in the bath. 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"

-pg18

"Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn't pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well."

-pg77

"When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue"

-77

"And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners 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."

-80

"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"

-90

"How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?"

-117

"I was afraid that at any moment my control would snap, and I would start babbling about how I couldn't read and couldn't write and how I must be just about the only person who had stayed awake for a solid month without dropping dead of exhaustion"

-pg151

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

-pg155

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

-pg227

I am. I am. I am.

-xxrachelhelen