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...

From here to happiness is a road, flat, upright, distances in between blotted out by vision, yet realized by intelligence.

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned upand be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free – The peacefulness is so big it dazes...

I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci’s face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he...

Empty, I echo to the least footfall

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place...

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

There was a beautiful time…

I don’t see what women see in other women,” I’d told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. “What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?”Doctor Nolan paused....

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...

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative–which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.

LoreleiIt is no night to drown in:A full moon, river lapsingBlack beneath bland mirror-sheen,The blue water-mists droppingScrim after scrim like fishnetsThough fishermen are sleeping,The massive castle turretsDoubling themselves in a glassAll stillness. Yet these shapes...

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three… nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into...

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

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 about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian...

I told Doreen I would not go to the show or the luncheon or the film premiere, but that I would not go to Coney Island either, I would stay in bed. Then I wondered...

If only I can find him… the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn’t I expect it in a man?

Si uno hace algo incorrecto en la mesa con cierta arrogancia, como si supiera perfectamente que está haciendo lo que corresponde, puede salir del paso y nadie pensará que es grosero o que ha recibido...

I don’t know how long I kept at it…I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn’t seem to be summer any more

Dying is an art.Like everything else,I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I have a call.

But writing poems and letters doesn’t seem to do much good.

What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit’s cry may be wilderBut it has no soul.

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...

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you’ll cut the chord / articulating song.

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...