The Bell Jar (FF Classics)

felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit,

didn’t know shorthand either. This meant I couldn’t get a good job after college.

The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. It mightn’t make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

The great, grey eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist-shrouded sun focusing all the white and silent distances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to stall at my feet.

Then I saw that my body had all sorts of little tricks, such as making my hands go limp at the crucial second, which would save it, time and again, whereas if I had the whole say, I would be dead in a flash. I would simply have to ambush it with whatever sense I had left, or it would trap me in its stupid cage for fifty years without any sense at a

The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.