To the person in the bell jar, blanked and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

The Bell Jar is probably the book I've reread the most times. When I first read it aged seventeen, it spoke to me like no other book had at that point, and changed how I saw writing forever. Plath is probably my biggest inspiration when it comes to writing, and her work really helped me when I was going through my first bout of depression. It's one of my favourite books of all time and to summarise how I feel about it, I think I'll just say that without this novel, I don't think I'd be here and, even if I was, I wouldn't be the reader let alone person that I am today.