Quotes By Letter: P

“How could this George Bakewell have become a doctor so suddenly? I wondered. He didn't really know me, either. He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

I turned my face to the wall.

'Get out,' I said. 'Get the hell out and don't come back.'”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. 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 could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“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 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.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was 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. ”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

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

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine. I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head...”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“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.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“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.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn't take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“To the person in the Bell Jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.”

-The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

~

“What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.”

-The Eye Mote, Sylvia Plath

~

“I am myself. That is not enough.”

-The Jailer, Sylvia Plath

~

“Cold glass, how you insert yourself

Between myself and myself.
I scratch like a cat.

The blood that runs is dark fruit---
An effect, a cosmetic.

You smile.
No, it is not fatal.”

-The Other, Sylvia Plath

~

“What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.”

-Three Women; A Poem For Three Voices, Sylvia Plath

~

“One night she hid the pink cotton scarf from her raincoat in the pillowcase when the nurse came around to lock up her drawers and closets for the night. In the dark she had made a loop and tried to pull it tight around her throat. But always just as the air stopped coming and she felt the rushing grow louder in her ears, her hands would slacken and let go, and she would lie there panting for breath, cursing the dumb instinct in her body that fought to go on living.”

-Tongues of Stone, Sylvia Plath

Recommended by kalee.

~

“I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing.”

-Tulips, Sylvia Plath

~

“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.”

-Two Campers In Cloud Country, Sylvia Plath

~

“...What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind and stupid. I am not a veteran, passing my legless, armless days in a wheelchair. I am not that mongoloidish old man shuffling out of gates of the mental hospital. I have too much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that's why I want to be everyone - so no one can blame me for being I. So I won't have to take the responsibility for my own character development and philosophy. People are happy - - - if that means being content with your lot: feeling comfortable as the complacent round peg struggling in a round hole, with no awkward or painful edges â?" no space to wonder or question in. I am not content, because my lot is limiting, as are all others. People specialize; people become devoted to an idea; people "find themselves." But the very content that comes from finding yourself is over-shadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesque, but a special kind of grotesque.”

-Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

~

“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter--they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship--but the loneliness of the soul in it's appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”

-Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

~

“God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the lights glaring overhead, the fan whirling loudly. Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches... I'm lost...”

-Unabridged Journals, Sylvia Plath

Navigation

Back to 'Quotes'
Back to 'Do You SI?'