I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister resp...
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 experience.
My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.
If a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should th...
Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy...
We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!
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.
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.