66 quotes found
“because wherever I saton the deck of a ship or at a street caf in Paris or BangkokI would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
“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 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 ...”
“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.”
“I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way d...”
“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 d...”
“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 eye...”
“Well take up where we left off, Esther, she had said, with her sweet martyrs smile. Well act as if all this were a bad dream. A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead...”
“I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to...”
“I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.”
“My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."I looked at her. "Like what?""Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all righ...”
“The reason why I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from ano...”
“The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.”
“I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.”
“And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the b...”
“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.”
“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 the throat and I'd cry for ...”
“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
“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.”
“Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.”
