My mother smiled. “I knew my baby wasn’t like that.”I looked at her. “Like what?””Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.” She paused. “I knew you’d decide to be all right...

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.

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

What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled ‘enemy?

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

We are not what we might be; what we are / Outlaws all extrapolation / Beyond the interval of now and here: / White whales are gone with the white ocean.

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...

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly...

They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.–From the poem “Lady Lazarus”, written 23-29 October 1962

The tongues of hell are dull.

I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

I am your opus.

I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn’t believe...

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it

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

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.

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

The lawn was white with doctors

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I...

The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven — and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive...

Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There...

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...

I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city’s mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I...

Mad Girl’s Love SongI shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;I lift my lids and all is born again.(I think I made you up inside my head.)The stars go waltzing out in blue...

I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy.

Ready for a new life

I?I walk alone;The midnight streetSpins itself from under my feet;My eyes shutThese dreaming houses all snuff out;Through a whim of mineOver gables the moon’s celestial onionHangs high.IMake houses shrinkAnd trees diminishBy going far; my look’s...

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name. –From the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song

Very few people do this any more. It’s too risky. First of all, it’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete...

Nick and the CandlestickI am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactitesDrip and thicken, tearsThe earthen wombExudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airsWrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides.They weld to me like plums.Old...

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness – and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in...

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

The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod...

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when to stop.

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.

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. One fig...

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...

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

I Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty...

This boy – his name was Eric – said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in...