The Bell Jar chronicles the mental and emotional journey of the character Esther Greenwood.
As a young woman with promising prospects, Esther gradually spirals into depression.
She experiences a mental breakdown, symbolized by the oppressive ‘bell jar.’
The tale is laced with the gritty realities of gender expectations, societal pressures, and the stigmatization of mental health during the 1950s.
The book provides a raw, intimate look into the struggle with mental illness and the pursuit of one’s identity.
The Bell Jar Quotes With Page Numbers
“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 1, Page 2
“I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 1, Page 3
“I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 1, Page 3
“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 1, Page 4
“I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 1, Page 8
“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 1, Page 10
“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 1, Page 12
“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. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction–every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 2, Page 16
“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 2, Page 17
“Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 2, Page 19
“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 this made me even sadder and more tired.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 3, Page 30
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 4, Page 44
“The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 4, Page 46
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 5, Page 52
“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 or couldn’t sleep.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Buddy Willard and Esther Greenwood, Chapter 5, Page 56
“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 5, Page 59
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 7, Page 75
“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 7, Page 77
“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get 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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 7, Page 83
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 7, Page 83
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 7, Page 85
“Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 7, Page 86
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther to Buddy, Chapter 8, Page 94
“The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 7, Page 97
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 8, Page 97
“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 a week.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 9, Pages 100-01
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther, the photographer, and Jay Cee, Chapter 9, Page 101
“If you love her”, I said, “you’ll love somebody else someday.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 9, Page 108
“I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 10, Page 117
“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.
That would fix a lot of people. ”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 10, Page 119
“At any rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day.
Then I knew what the problem was.
I needed experience.
How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 10, Page 121
“I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 11, Page 128
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 11, Page 128
“Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 11, Page 129
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 11, Pages 136-37
“I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 12, Page 145
“I knew you’d decide to be all right again.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood and Mrs. Greenwood, Chapter 12, Page 146
“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 12, Page 147
“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 12, Page 147
“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 jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 12, Page 147
“The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 13, Page 160
“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 13, Page 161
“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 14, Page 177
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood to Marco, Chapter 14, Page 182
“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 15, Page 185
“I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 16, Page 202
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 20, Page 237
“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?”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 20, Page 241
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 20, Page 243
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, A Biographical Note by Lois Ame
What are some mental illness quotes from The Bell Jar?
“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.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther to Buddy, Chapter 8, Page 94
What is the quote to the person in The Bell Jar?
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, Chapter 20, Page 237