To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
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 loosing 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.
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.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.
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.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
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.
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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?
I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
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 felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
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.
I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
or simply:
