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...

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn’t do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that...

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars …

I didn’t want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too...

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

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...

What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

O love, how did you get here?–Nick and the Candlestick

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacationWhere trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses

The reason why I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one...

Seré una de las pocas poetisas en el mundo completamente feliz de ser mujer, no una de esas amargadas y frustradas, retorcidas imitadoras de hombres, que en su mayoría acaban destrozadas

DADDYYou do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.Daddy, I have had to kill you.You died...

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy....

I’ll never speak to God again.

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn’t stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son’s sickness,...

Mrs Guinea answered my letter and invited me to lunch at her home. That was where I saw my first finger-bowl.The water had a few cherry blossoms floating in it, and I thought it must...

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

Neurotic, ha!” I let out a scornful laugh. “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one...

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

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

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.

Then I thought, “No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest...

I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath.I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York,...

I am not cruel —only truthful.

I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.

I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

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.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack.

I can’t deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are...

I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll...

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important...

Stupid girl. You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.

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...

I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You...

I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.

Stars open among the lilies.Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?This is the silence of astounded souls.