The Bell Jar: A Novel (Modern Classics)

The big questions: how to sort out your life, how to work out what you want, how to deal with men and sex, how to be true to yourself and how to figure out what that means—those things are the same today.

I’d be coming into the office. We had these mimeographed

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.

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

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 and couldn’t sleep.

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

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 hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

the yogurt and strawberry jam that I decided I