Living with him is like being told a perpetual story, his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter—for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars, you have a right to be here.

Yes, I want the world’s praise, money, and love, and am furious with anyone getting ahead of me.

I felt proud that the baby’s first real adventure should be as a protest against the insanity of world annihilation. Already a certain percentage of unborn children are doomed by fallout, and no one knows the cumulative effects of what is already poisoning the air and sea.

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.

Is anyone anywhere happy.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses.

I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip one hour more of sleep and live.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people’s eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.

I have a visual imagination.

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think, to think and live, to live and learn, this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love.

I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here ‘freelance’ and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.

I am sure there are things that can’t be cured by a good bath but I can’t think of one.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.

Not easy to state the change you made. If I’m alive now, I was dead, though, like a stone, unbothered by it.

This is no time for the private point of view.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

I must be lean and write and make worlds beside this to live in.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough.

Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

Save them for my funeral,  I’d said.

I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

Do you know what a poem is, Esther? ‘No, what?’ I would say. ‘A piece of dust.’ Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you’re curing. They’re dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

I have always been extremely fond of the definition of death which says it is, inaccessibility to experience.

Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood—the wailing of gulls and the smell of salt—somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon.

It didn’t seem to be summer anymore.

I think the sea swallowed dozens of tea sets—tossed in abandon off liners or consigned to the tide by jilted brides.

I don’t know how long I kept at it. I felt reasonably safe, stretched out on the floor, and lay quite still.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating.

I took up the silver knife and cracked off the cap of my egg. Then I put down the knife and looked at it. I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the center of empty air.

The sea was our main entertainment. When company came, we set them before it on rugs, with thermoses and sandwiches and colored umbrellas, as if the water, blue, green, gray, navy or silver as it might be, were enough to watch.

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them. But they were part of me. They were my landscape.

My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.

Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl

Every woman adores a Fascist.

I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. 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.

When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.

I must get my soul back from you, I am killing my flesh without it.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like God, invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.

My mother had taught shorthand and typing to support us since my father died, and secretly she hated it and hated him for dying and leaving no money because he didn’t trust life insurance salesmen.

I am still so naïve. I know pretty much what I like and dislike, but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe.

I felt wise and cynical as all hell.

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

I didn’t 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.

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black, that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world.

I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment, and companionship—but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane all the time. When I was crazy, that was all I was.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

And I sit here without identity, faceless. My head aches.

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 somebody 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.’

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 my own sour air.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you for so long.

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.

At this rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience.

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. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction—every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.

My mother’s face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

Love is a desperate artifice to take the place of those two original parents who turned out not to be omnisciently right gods.

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.

I have room in me for love. And forever so many little lives.

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn’t want it, you cannot take it back. It’s gone forever.

If you love her, I said,  you’ll love somebody else someday.

He was always saying how his mother said, ‘What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.

How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.

If they substituted the word ‘lust’ for ‘love’ in the popular songs it would come nearer to the truth.

I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.

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 numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

I hadn’t, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

How we need that security. How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

I do not love. I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love.

Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people.