Цитаты из книги The Bell Jar

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn’t hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

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.

– Не надо бы тебе это видеть, – пробормотал Бадди мне на ухо. – После такого зрелища тебе никогда не захочется иметь детей. Женщинам нельзя такое показывать, иначе это станет концом рода человеческого.

But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

I was my own woman.

The next step was to find the proper sort of man.

'I don't see what women see in other women,” I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. 'What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?'

Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, 'Tenderness.'

I needed experience.

How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way.

I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

'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 what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from,' until it made me tired.

...я подумала: как же странно, что мне раньше никогда не приходило в голову, что я была абсолютно счастлива лишь до девяти лет

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.

My dream was some day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

Но они уже вошли в меня. Они стали частью меня самой. Стали моим пейзажем.

Было чрезвычайно утешительно сознавать, что я уже упала и, следовательно, больше мне падать некуда.