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...

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...

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap...

I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only youDon’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There’s no getting up it by...

The main point of the article was that a man’s world is different from a women’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a women’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds...

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to...

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought...

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...

God, who am I?

enemy?

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Sometimes I feel like I’m not solid. I’m hollow. There’s nothing behind my eyes. I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.

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

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...

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take...

The blood jet is poetryThere is no stopping it.

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts...

Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep.

And of course I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all.

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...

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.”(Initiation)

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

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