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.

Then it hit me and I just blurted, ‘I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between…I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like...

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

This is my first snow at Smith. It is like any other snow, but from a different window, and there lies the singular charm of it.

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.

LADY LAZARUSI have done it again.One year in every tenI manage it–A sort of walking miracle, my skinBright as a Nazi lampshade,My right footA paperweight,My face a featureless, fineJew linen.Peel off the napkinO my enemy.Do...

brave love, dreamnot of staunching such strict flame, but come,lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.

I don’t know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to...

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.

There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite...

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet...

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can’t be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must...

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all.

I woke to the sound of rain.

Is anyone anywhere happy?

Is it the sea you hear in me,Its dissatisfactions?Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

I love the people,’ I said. ‘I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks...

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free——The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it...

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream – and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has...

The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

If they substituted the word ‘Lust’ for ‘Love’ in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t,...

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of...

It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he...