She makes use of the soft of the bread for a napkin. She falls asleep at times with shoes on, on unmade beds. When a little money comes in, June buys delicacies, strawberries in the winter, caviar and...
She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me. Henry suddenly faded. She was color and brilli...
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. —D. H. Lawrence: An Unpr...
Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs.
Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child's blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reali...
It is hard for me to believe in continuous, sustained happiness, just as it is hard for me to believe in love.
I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancyof miracles.
I have seen romanticism outlast the realistic. I have seen men forget the beautiful women they have possessed, forget the prostitutes, and remember the first woman they idolized, the woman they could...
I am most deeply concerned over a trend toward conformity, a growth of anti-intellectualism, which manifests itself in a sneering attitude toward education, science, and the arts. The tendency is to s...
I am losing my great, dissolving, disintegrating pity for others, in which I saw deflected the compassion I wanted for myself. I no longer give compassion, which means I no longer need to receive it.
I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.
I always have difficulty with people who are not openly warm, expressive. I need a certain sign, a certain invitation.
How to live as divided cells — voilà! Something always eludes the scientists, the poets, the stargazers, the biologists, the anthropologists. Something eludes the informers, detectives, police, lawyer...
His life rushes onward in such torrential rhythm that...only angels and devils can catch the tempo of it.
Hell is a different place for each man, or each man has his own particular hell. My descent into the inferno is a descent into the irrational level of existence, where the instincts and blind emotions...
For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry's choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.
Don't wait for it, I said. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wan...
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my m...
Around her hair there was a saffron aureole, and her skin was a sea shell...
A long time ago, said Michael, I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity. But not to feel...not to love...is like dying within life, Michael.