"It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world." "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." "It suggested a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet." "I felt wise and cynical as all hell." "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." "The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence." "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep,or in love with someody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: I'll go take a hot bath." "After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race." "All my life I'd told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true, I did everything well enough and got all A's, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me." "There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends." "I collected men with interesting names" "I didn't think I deserved it. After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop." "If you expect nothing from somebody you are never dissapointed." "Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent." "I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old." "The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way." "I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end." "A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals." "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." "This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself." "And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a womyn before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat." "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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state." "If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutlally exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days." "I'm so glad they're going to die." "It's awful such people should be alive." "I didnt' want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didnt' know why I was going to cry, 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." "I began to see why womyn-haters could make such fools of womyn. Womyn-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chockfull of power. They descended, adn then they disappeared. You could never catch one." "Children made me sick" "How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?" "I can't sleep. I can't read. I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off. I turned my hands palm up." "I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it." "Then he would lean back in his chair and match the tips of his fingers together in a little steeple and tell me why I couldn't sleep and why I couldn't read and why I couldn't eat 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 os stories, you might still be alive when you hit the bottom. I thought seven stories must be a safe distance." "They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong." "It must take a lot of courage to die like that. My trouble was I hated the sight of blood." "I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow." "I wondered, if I'd been my old self, if I would have liked him." "I thought drowning must be the kindest way to die, and burning the worst." "Priests were terrible gossips." "The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir." "I wondered if all womyn did with other womyn was lie and hug." "What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb, I had told Doctor Nolan. A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line." "Why was I so unmaternal and apart."
