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I’ve been reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath slowly and letting each chapter really sink in, and, I have to say, I’m loving it.
The way Plath explores Esther’s inner world and mental health is incredibly powerful.
I’ll be posting my full review on the blog soon, but for now, I’ve put together a list of the best quotes from the book.
What is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath About?
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is about Esther Greenwood, a young woman who seems to have everything going for her: intelligence, beauty, and success.
But, she struggles with depression and slowly descends into a mental breakdown.
As her mental health deteriorates, she feels trapped, as though she is living under a bell jar and suffocating from the pressure of societal expectations and her own inner turmoil.
The novel digs into mental illness, identity, and the pressures women face and it offers a raw and honest portrayal of Esther’s inner conflict.
Grab Your Copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath on Amazon

Quotes from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath You’ll Love
1. “I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say ‘fine.'”
2. “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
3. “I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”
4. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
5. “The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
6. “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.”
7. “But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. 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.”
8. “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.”
9. “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.”
10. “I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with.”
11. “If you love her,” I said, “you’ll love somebody else someday.”
12. “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.”
13. “I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.”
14. “I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.”
15. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
16. “The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.”
17. “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, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.”
18. “I hated the idea of getting married. 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.”
19. “Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
20. “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.”
21. “I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.”
22. “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
23. “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.”
24. “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
25. “I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn’t night and it wasn’t day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.”
Grab Your Copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath on Amazon

26. “I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
27. “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.”
28. “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.”
29. “Don’t let the wicked city get you down.”
30. “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.”
31. “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.”
32. “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.”
33. “The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”
34. “It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
35. “I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from.”
36. “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.”
37. “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”
38. “But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”
39. “I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires.”
40. “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.”
41. “I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.”
42. “I am sure there are things that can’t be cured by a good bath but I can’t think of one.”
43. “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
44. “I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.”
45. “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
46. “I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired.”
47. “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.”
48. “I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn’t night and it wasn’t day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end.”
49. “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.”
50. “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
Grab Your Copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath on Amazon

Stay tuned for my full review on the blog, but in the meantime, feel free to check out some related posts I’ve linked below.
I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the book, so don’t forget to drop a comment.