- Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. [...] (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.)
- 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 that excitement at about a million miles an hour.
- The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
- I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.
- It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no further.
- 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.
- If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
- This used to be one of my rules (even before I had read this book), but really, expecting nothing is easier said than done. So I changed it to: Always expect the worst.
- [...] I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about 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 boys before him. / The same thing happened over and over: / 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. / 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.
- [...]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 my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.
- How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?
- [...] and why everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.
- The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
- The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life.
- The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.
- 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 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 me, 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.
- How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?
- To the person in the ball jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
mar 17 2012 ∞
mar 21 2012 +
mar 21 2012 +