The Bell Jar (Unabridged)

Girls like that make me sick. I'm so jealous I can't speak.

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

and how all the little successes I'd totted up so happily at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate–glass fronts along Madison Avenue.

had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.

was supposed to be having the time of my life.
I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America

If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Mrs Guinea never said anything, and it was only much later, when I told a debutante I knew at college about the dinner, that I learned what I had done.

'What do you have in mind after you graduate?'
What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.
'I don't really know,' I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

I said to myself: 'Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don't know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.'