She looked terrible, but very wise.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of sceneryair, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
“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 a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless 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 jump...”
“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 spac...”
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
“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.”
“Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia's mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I'd understand how it's the little things that pull you under.”
“Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.”
“She looked terrible, but very wise.”
“Wise are my ways witty my actions”
“I believe in only one thing,the power of human will.”
“Things can turn out differently, Apollo. That's the nice thing about being human. We only have one life, but we can choose what kind of story it's going to be.”