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The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Top 10 Best Quotes

“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.”

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

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

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”

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

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”

“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 trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”

“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.”

“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”

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Book Keywords:

ecstasy, nature, humor, friendship, depression-silence, happiness, life-choices-fig-trees, existence, shared-ordeal, neurosis, expectations, breath, poetry

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