1. “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 hullaballoo.”
2. “I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.”
3. “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.”
4. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
5. “He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.”
6. “Doctor Nolan said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her.”
7. “Let me fly with you.”
8. “I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”
9. “It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
10. “I felt moved and tender and perfectly certain about what I was going to do.”
11. “Of course, our mothers were good friends. They had gone to school together and then both married their professors and settled down in the same town.”
12. “I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.”
13. “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 and hour.”
14. “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”
15. “The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
16. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
17. “I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
18. “I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.”
19. “I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.”
20. “The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.”
21. “It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.”
22. “Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.”
23. “A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco’s diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon’s wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape”
24. “I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”
25. “Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would actually be doing.”
26. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for all the good it did me.”
27. “…I’d always spoil what I did so nobody would ask me to do it again.”
28. “You oughtn’t to see this,” Will muttered in my ear. “You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.”
29. “Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn’t breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.”
30. “I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together.”
31. “I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say “fine”
32. “I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. 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.”
33. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
34. “All I’d heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for.”
35. “I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”
36. “I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
37. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
38. “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.”
39. “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.”
40. “There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”
41. “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.”
42. “I am sure there are things that can’t be cured by a good bath but I can’t think of one.”
43. “These conversations I had in my mind usually repeated the beginnings of conversations I’d really had with Buddy, only they finished with me answering him back quite sharply, instead of just sitting around and saying, “I guess so.”
44. “The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
45. “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.”
46. “There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap backed in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the newness in Joan’s grave.”
47. “I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”
48. “The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.”
49. “If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.”
50. “What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.”
51. “The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.”
52. “This hotel – the Amazon – was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents […] and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.”
53. “And when my picture came out in the magazine the twelve of us were working on—drinking martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion—everybody would think I must be having a real whirl. Look”
54. “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 seen anybody die?”
55. “My favourite tree was the Weeping Scholar Tree. I thought it must come from Japan. They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong.”
56. “I’m not afraid of being lost. We all wander off from time to time. It’s the fear of never quite finding myself that keeps me up at night.”
57. “There was a uniformity, as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under siftings of pale, fine dust.”
58. “I didn’t think I deserved it. After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when to stop.”
59. “The woman’s stomach stuck up so high I couldn’t see her face or the upper part of her body at all. She seemed to have nothing but an enormous spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups and all the time the baby was being born she never stopped making this unhuman whooping noise.”
60. “There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road.”
61. “The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.”
62. “Even the apostles were tentmakers…”
63. “Why honey, don’t you want to get dressed?”
My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another.
It’s almost three in the afternoon.”
I’m writing a novel,” I said. “I haven’t got time to change into this and change into that.”
64. “After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.”
65. ″‘I don’t really know,’ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.”
66. “The eyes and faces all turned themselves towards me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”
67. “because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
68. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
69. “Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem.”
70. “Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”
71. “I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.”
72. “But when it cam right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. I t 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.”
73. “Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.”
74. “I liked looking 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.”
75. “Don’t let the wicked city get you down”
76. “The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.”
77. “My trouble was I took everything Buddy Willard told me as the honest-to-God truth.”
78. “I wondered at what point in space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.”
79. “At first I wondered why the room felt so safe. Then I realized it was because there were no windows.”
80. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
81. “All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. ”
82. “I knew something was wrong with me that summer …all the little successes I’d totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts along Madison Avenue.
83. “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.”
84. “I am I am I am.”
85. “The room blued into view, and I wondered where the night had gone.”
86. “Ready for a new life”
87. “He was always saying how his mother said, “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,” and, “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from,” until it made me tired.”
88. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
89. “There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
90. “I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead — after all, I had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.”
91. “I hated the idea of serving men in any way.”
92. “It never occurred to me to say no.”
93. “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed”
94. “I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
95. “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”
96. “I couldn’t stand the idea of women having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.”
97. “At this rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day.
Then I knew what the problem 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? 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?.”
98. “There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the extra person in the room.”
99. “I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.”
100. “Wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stweing in my own sour air.”
101. “Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
102. “The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of my vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.”
103. “The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.”
104. “I’m so jealous I can’t speak.”
105. “That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
“Save them for my funeral,” I’d said.”
106. “What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.”
107. “Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”
108. “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old”
109. “The day I went into physics class it was death.”
110. “I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.”
111. “What a man wants is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
112. “I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”
113. “I am going for a long walk”
114. “Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.”
115. “I lay, trying to slow the beating of my heart, as every beat pushed forth another gush of blood.”
116. “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
117. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
118. “It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
119. “There was a beautiful time…”
120. “So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.”
121. “I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.”
122. “I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”
123. “I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.
I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.”
124. “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
125. “i want to be important, by being different. & these girls are all the same.”
126. “The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.”
127. “I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.”
128. “The same thing happened over and over: I would catch sight of some flawless man in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.”
129. “I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.”
130. “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 fig-tree.”
131. “She looked terrible, but very wise.”
132. “I’m very interested in everything.” The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee’s desk, like so many wooden nickels.”
133. “People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.”
134. “Doesn’t your work interest you, Esther?
You know, Esther, you’ve got the perfect setup of a true neurotic.
You’ll never get anywhere like that, you’ll never get anywhere like that, you’ll never get anywhere like that.”
135. “I couldn’t stand was Buddy’s pretending I was so sexy and he was so pure, when all the time he’d been having an affair with that tarty waitress and must have felt like laughing in my face.”
136. “I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
137. “I collected men with interesting names.”
138. “I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
139. “Then I thought, “No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.”
140. “I don’t know how long I kept at it…
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn’t seem to be summer any more”
141. “When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.”
142. “If there’s anything I look down on, it’s a man in a blue outfit.”
143. “I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.”
144. “I knew you’d decide to be all right again.”
145. “I felt it was very important not to be recognized.”
