The Bell Jar Quotes

An unfree mind is just like a windmill inside the bell jar! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

We were talking about The Bell Jar, because we were sixteen, and we wanted to be depressed in New York. ~ Deborah Willis

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar. ~ Sylvia Plath

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars,
the trees and flowers were strewing
their cool odos. There was no moon. ~ Sylvia Plath

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. ~ Sylvia Plath

I kind of don't believe in actors directing themselves. Obviously some people have done it well, but I don't see how I could. It's funny that you ask, because I've just been thinking that maybe I'd rather direct The Bell Jar than act in it. It's a huge leap to go from a short to a feature, so I'm tentative - I'm like, Well, that's just so triple-type-A personality of you. ~ Julia Stiles

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers
goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me at every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.
I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat. ~ Sylvia Plath

I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together. ~ Sylvia Plath

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure. ~ Sylvia Plath

Esther knows nothing about alcohol, and says, "My dream was someday ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful. ~ Sylvia Plath

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it. ~ Sylvia Plath

She looked terrible, but very wise. ~ Sylvia Plath

We'll take up where we left off, Esther', she had said, with her sweet martyr's smile. 'We'll 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 baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything. ~ Sylvia Plath

What do you have in mind after you graduate?"
What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate
school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write
books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had
these plans on the tip of my tongue.
"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. ~ Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is there for me when actual living people upon who I have depended upon my whole life, are not. What I mean to say is, without her words, I'd be exponentially more messed up than I am already. ~ Arlaina Tibensky

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. ~ Sylvia Plath

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come. ~ Sylvia Plath

Someone once said that under the bell jar of compliance, the only thing that blooms is rage. ~ Jane Fonda

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. ~ Sylvia Plath

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.
"Save them for my funeral," I'd said. ~ Sylvia Plath

We'll 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 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 gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape. ~ Sylvia Plath

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
'No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. 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. ~ Sylvia Plath

I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens. ~ Paul Westerberg

I think Christians fail so often to get answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God. They just drop down and say a few words, and then jump up and forget it and expect God to answer them. Such praying always reminds me of the small boy ringing his neighbor's door-bell, and then running away as fast as he can go. ~ Edward McKendree Bounds

But his heart was heavy, notwithstanding; and he wished, as he crept into his narrow bed, that that were his coffin, and that he could be lain in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground, with the tall grass waving gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep bell to soothe him in his sleep. ~ Charles Dickens

What does it mean to still be ashamed of interests that so many other people openly celebrate? What does it mean to still be ashamed of the part of myself that has, in so many ways, bought me my entire career? If I had not been a fantasy reader, a video game player, a D&D dungeon master, I would probably not be a writer or an editor or a professor. ~ Matt Bell

Evanton creaked his way toward the sound of the bell at a speed that made snails look fast - if he decided to answer the door at all. If you made the mistake of ringing the bell while he was already on the way, he got angry. Kaylin had learned this early. On the other hand, if he'd actually failed to hear the door when she was expected, and she failed to ring the bell a second time, he also got angry. It was very much lose-lose, with hope wedged in to add anxiety. ~ Michelle Sagara

Ding! Ding! Ding! I tapped the brass bell in rapid succession until Violet bustled in from the back room, wearing the blue-and-white pinafore that was the SugarWerks's uniform and a frown that was not. The same age as Nic and I, Violet wore her amethyst hair spiked and a brass gearring stud on the left side of her nose. On one set of knuckles, BAKE was tattooed in elaborate black calligraphy; CAKE was on the other. Today she had an aquamarine bow pinned to the top of her head, a silver cupcake and crossbones marking the spot between the two loops of ribbon. ~ Lisa Mantchev

I trained like an animal, but the thing is focus and concentration. When the bell rings it's like when the little red light goes on over the camera. And I can usually nail my lines on the first or second take because I'm right there. ~ Mickey Rourke

To claim, therefore, inerrancy for the King James Version, or even for the Revised Version, is to claim inerrancy for men who never professed it for themselves. ~ William Bell Riley

Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It's an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.
This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures. ~ Rob Bell

Cogswhallop glanced skeptically at the complex runes. "Are you sure this'll work, gen'ral?"
"Of course I'm sure-"
Ping. The silvery note echoed in the cramped room. Makenna felt her face turn scarlet. ~ Hilari Bell

If you happen to be out at night on the bike path without a light, ring your bell constantly. No bell? Then sing "Hotel Yorba" on a continuous loop, loud enough to warn the unseen. ~ Grant Petersen

20 ODE 20

The New Year bell rings,
On deafened ears,
Promises to be,
For the coming year.
We've all had our Christmas,
A time of good cheer,
But what of our future,
As it draws so near?
I promise not to laugh,
At your ridiculous gear,
Or to say how much you've put on,
In the passing of a year.
I promise not to cry,
When I leave you by the side,
The side of the roadway,
As I say goodbye.
So 2020 has come at last,
And just as our friendship,
It will come to pass.
The bell keeps on chiming,
Incessant as it sounds,
I will be forever thankful,
When I am put,
In thy hallow ground. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Atoms are a relationship of energy. You are a relationship of energy interacting with another person who is another complex relationship of energy. We all exchange more than words with each other ... We are made of the same substance as rocks and stars.. We are an exotic cocktail living on this planet.. We live in this universe which is a self-transcending reality ~ Rob Bell

If the right thing came along at the right time, it would be an enormous kind of challenge. ~ Jamie Bell

Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind. ~ Bell Hooks

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things. ~ Bell Hooks

Foolish man, the woman spat coldly. A stronger, smarter generation is coming. They will walk the earth as the ashes of your organization rain from the skies. ~ Alessia Dickson

It's priceless what you learn when you actually do. The best education is effectively to be functioning in the occupation that you want to take on. ~ Lake Bell

I'm worried that a few people are confusing the ringing of a church bell with the ringing of a cash register, .. When I hear about leaders of charities being provided a $300,000 Bentley to drive around in, my fear is that it's the taxpayers who subsidize this charity who are really being taken for a ride. ~ Chuck Grassley

I just can't muster up enough pride for a town whose most cosmopolitan area is the Taco Bell car park on a saturday night ~ Chris Colfer

All I can do is do my best work, try to create the best kind of moment to moment reality that I can do. That's what I do. I'm an actor. And all the rest of it is like baseball. You hit the ball. Sometimes it goes in the hole. Sometimes it goes to the player. ~ Tobin Bell

I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land... I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. . . . The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. H ~ Frederick Douglass

Critical interventions around race did not destroy the women's movement; it became stronger . . . It shows us that no matter how misguided feminist thinkers have been in the past, the will to change, the will to create the context for struggle and liberation, remains stronger than the need to hold on to wrong beliefs and assumptions. ~ Bell Hooks

What I needed was to lose myself in a good book, one with tons of sex and angst, complete with an unbelievable happily-ever-after that made me love and hate the book at the same time. ~ J. Lynn

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky ...
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ Henry James

Do you know the concept of karma? It's kind of like a circle, or cause-and-effect, like a slow-tolling bell you rang maybe a year ago, five years ago, maybe in another lifetime if you believe in that. Karma means that what you do today, and why you do it, makes you who you are forever: as if you were clay, and every thought and action left a mark in that clay, bent it, shaped it, even ruined it… but with karma there are no excuses, no explanations, no I-didn't-really-mean-it-so-can-I-have-some-more-clay. Karma takes everything you do very, very seriously. ~ Kathe Koja

Everyone in the place seen me nut him apart from the ref, it caught him on the blind side. I tried to nut him on the eyebrow so it would split open, but I got him on the forehead. The crowd turned right against me, but I made it to the last bell and lost on a unanimous decision. ~ Stephen Richards

We worked over at that place The Plantation Inn with The Del Rios. It was really wild over there. ~ William Bell

As the actor, you just have to believe in what your character is doing in order to play them. ~ Kristen Bell

The joy is in the creation. So I've never had a target audience, it's always been about being true to the work as it emerges. ~ Rob Bell

Just be careful. Passion is a bridge that connects love and hate. When you're standing in the middle of that bridge, don't let yourself get turned around. You've got to make sure you know which direction you're heading. Watch yourself. ~ Jay Bell

There seems to be a fear that if men are raised to be people of integrity, people who can love, they will be unable to be forceful and act violently if needed ... We see that females that are raised with the traits any person of integrity embodies can act with tenderness, with assertiveness, and with aggression if and when aggression is needed. ~ Bell Hooks

This is why for thousands of years Christians have found the cross to be so central to life. It speaks to us of God's suffering, God's pain, God's broken heart. It's God making the first move and then waiting for our response. ~ Rob Bell

In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" that not only introduced the word bit in print but established a field of study today known as information theory. Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously. ~ Charles Petzold

It's just holding hands," she said. "But it's totally messing with me."
"Yeah." He moved his fingers between hers, and that, too, he felt everywhere – all over the surface of his skin.
"What is it?"
"I don't know."
"I've had sex that isn't this good. ~ Serena Bell

Listen to yourself You really expect me to believe that my brother is some kind of pixie with glitter dust and butterfly wings."

"Don't be stupid " Rob said mildly. "You have no idea what you're talking about. You're thinking 'Tinker Bell' which is a typical human response to the word faery. The real fey aren't like that at all. ~ Julie Kagawa

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger. ~ Bell Hooks

True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. ~ Bell Hooks

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed one day, and somebody had tweeted me a picture of Justin Bieber that had been Photoshopped with makeup or something. And I thought it was funny and so I hit retweet - I just retweeted a tweet - and all of a sudden, the remarks were coming in. ~ Drake Bell

She makes me wash, they make me comb all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed ... the widder [widow] eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she wakes up by a bell-everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it ~ Mark Twain

Somehow, I don't think Jesus came to Earth to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. ~ Michael Moore

The opportunity to co-create is a gift you give your customer as a way to summon their imagination. ~ Chip R. Bell

The fairy- again, Wendy assumed- was an angry tinkling ball of light with the prettiest girl imaginable inside. Diminutive but... solid, with a scandalous lack of decorous dress. All she wore was a ragged green shift which barely covered her hips and thighs and breasts and was gathered dangerously over only one shoulder. This was both shocking and delightful; it made the tiny creature resemble statues of ancient nymphs and nereids Wendy had seen. Her hair was even done up in classical style, a goddess-like bun of hair so golden it glowed. Tiny pointed ears curved their way through the few dangling tresses. Her eyes were enormous and not even remotely human: they were far apart and glaring.
The crowning glory was, of course, a pair of delicate iridescent wings sprouting from her back. Their shape was somewhere between butterfly and dragonfly. They were clear as glass and thin as onion skin. ~ Liz Braswell

Many have come to realization simply by listening to the tinkling of a bell or some other sound ~ Philip Kapleau

Our cultural capital has changed tremendously on its way into the twenty-first century. Manhattan has been secured and sanitized; it's smoke- and trans-fat-free. In the boroughs, many of the old jungles have been cleared as well. ~ Madison Smartt Bell

Things that other people do, or that happen to people you love, are some of the things you can't fight. ~ Hilari Bell