I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running.
I hated to serve men in any way.
I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.
I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again.
I collected men with interesting names.
I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how...
I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.
I am inhabited by a cry.Nightly it flaps outLooking, with its hooks, for something to loveI am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
How many different deaths I can die?
…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have...
…* to know a lot of people I love pieces of, and to want to synthesize those pieces in me somehow, be it by painting or writing. * to know that millions of others are unhappy and that life is a gentle...
Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as ind...
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
What a man wants is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' po...
To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itselfis a bad dream
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, i...
There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.
There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.