Untitled Flashcards Set

“all I could think about was the Rosenbergs”
“fake, country-wet freshness”
“I was supposed to be having the time of my life”
“ends up steering New York like her own private car” vs “numb trolley-bus”
“I cut the plastic starfish off the sunglasses case for the baby to play with”
Doreen was “one of her troubles”
“Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my bones”
Betsy - “Pollyana Cowgirl” -
“My names Elly Higginbottom”
“great white bearskins”
“the one an’ only Sunflower” - turns towards the sun, stationary.
“the city hung in my window, flat as a poster”.
“they are all dissolving and none of them matter any more”.
Doreen - “deep down I would have nothing at all to do with her”
Doreen - “ugly concrete testimony to my own dirty nature”.
“they will think you are original and very witty”.
“she was always on to me to learn shorthand after college, so I’d have a practical skill as well as a college degree.”
“I wished I had a mother like Jay Cee.”
“sick as dogs and crying for ma”
“Buddy Willard was a hypocrite”
“wealthy novelist... endowed a scholarship on girls who lived in her hometown”
“Do you know what a poem is, Esther” ... “a piece of dust”.
“only saw Buddy at church on Sundays”
Joan - “tombstone teeth”
“she never cares whether you spend any money on her or not.”
“these gruesome things”
“some awful torture table”
“enormous spider-fat stomach”.
“the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been.”
“what a woman wants is infinite security”
“what a man is is in an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”
“since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father.”
“dreadfully inadequate.”
“only marriage can bring the two worlds together properly.”
“change and excitement”
“flatten out underneath his feet”
“numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”
“Gazing down at the Jungfrau / From our chalet for two.”
“Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind... the dark heart of New York.”
“two diagonal lines of blood.. looked spectacular.”
“grotesque, protruding stomach”
“how would you like to be Mrs Willard”
“I didn’t feel one bit sorry.”
“all pale”
“morbid facade of pine trees”
“I thought... I could control the picture”
“cowy family”
“something” - electroshock therapy person
“little kids and pigs and chickens”
“the grey rock mocked me”
“dozens and dozens of other worms that were wriggling”
“wrapping my black coat around me”
“I’ll be there the whole time.”
“why did I attract these weird old women?”
“would you act differently if you didn’t have to worry about a baby?”
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
“As by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.”