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.

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...

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...

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

I woke to the sound of rain.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

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...

I guess I should have reacted the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado...

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...

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub...

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the...

EnnuiTea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,designing futures where nothing will occur:cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning shewill still predict no perils left to conquer.Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knightfinds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheardof,...

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of starsLetting in the light, peephole after peephole— A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

I don’t see,’ I said, ‘how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you’re young you’re so self-reliant. You don’t even need much religion.

I began to see why woman-haters could make such fools of women. Woman-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock full of power. They descended, and then they disappeared. You could never catch one.

Unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long.