Top quotes by Sylvia Plath

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Votes: 33

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days. Votes: 26

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Votes: 25

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion. Votes: 23

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am. Votes: 17

Kiss me and you will see how important I am. Votes: 16

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. Votes: 12

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again. Votes: 12

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars Votes: 12

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it. Votes: 11

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals. Votes: 10

Wear your heart on your skin in this life. Votes: 9

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. Votes: 8

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm. Votes: 7

Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children. Votes: 7

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time. Votes: 7

Is there no way out of the mind? Votes: 7

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Votes: 6

I have a visual imagination. Votes: 5

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know. Votes: 5

What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from. Votes: 4

One should be able to control and manipulate experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. Votes: 4

Empty, I echo to the least footfall Votes: 4

Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?Is it for such I agitate my heart? Votes: 4

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state. Votes: 4

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded. Votes: 2

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. Votes: 1

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 must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. Votes: 1

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after Ihad children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. Votes: 1

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled enemy? Votes: 0

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

And of course I didn't know who would marry me now that I'd been where I had been. I didn't know at all. Votes: 0

Doctor Nolan had said, quite bluntly, that a lot of people would treat me gingerly, or even avoid me, like a leper with a warning bell. My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me. Votes: 0

I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life. Votes: 0

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, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired. Votes: 0

Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones. Votes: 0

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure. Votes: 0

In this particular tub, two knees jut uplike icebergs, while minute brown hairs riseon arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soapnavigates the tidal slosh of seasbreaking on legendary beaches; in faithwe shall board our imagined ship and wildly sailamong sacred islands of the mad till deathshatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. Votes: 0

Sunday - the doctor's paradise! Doctors at country clubs, doctors at the seaside, doctors with mistresses, doctors with wives, doctors in church, doctors in yachts, doctors everywhere resolutely being people, not doctors. Votes: 0

Can nothingness be so prodigal? Votes: 0

Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying." Votes: 0

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it." Votes: 0

We are not what we might be; what we are / Outlaws all extrapolation / Beyond the interval of now and here: / White whales are gone with the white ocean." Votes: 0

Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves.All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting." Votes: 0

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." Votes: 0

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. Votes: 0

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting disconsolate mouth, the flat, bored, numb, expressionless eyes: symptoms of the foul decay within. Votes: 0

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you. Votes: 0

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. Votes: 0

We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate. Votes: 0

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. Votes: 0

I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. Votes: 0

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. Votes: 0

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow. Votes: 0

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited. Votes: 0

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between. Votes: 0

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end. Votes: 0

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences. Votes: 0

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends. Votes: 0

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. Votes: 0

I am too pure for you or anyone. Votes: 0

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both. Votes: 0

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn. Votes: 0

My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you. Votes: 0

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. Votes: 0

All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I am made, crudely, for success. Votes: 0

I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us. Votes: 0

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir. Votes: 0

Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it. Votes: 0

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said. Votes: 0

There was a beautiful time... Votes: 0

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey. Votes: 0

All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence. Votes: 0

Read widely of others' experiences, even if it'd be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance. Votes: 0

What I want back is what I was Before the bed, before the knife, Before the brooch-pin and the salve Fixed me in this parenthesis; Horses fluent in the wind, A place, a time gone out of mind. Votes: 0

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. Votes: 0

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 birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass. Votes: 0

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out. Votes: 0

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. Votes: 0

The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms. Votes: 0

With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be. Votes: 0

Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out. Votes: 0

The abstract kills, the concrete saves. Votes: 0

I lay and cried, and began to feel again, to admit I was human, vulnerable, sensitive. I began to remember how it had been before; how there was that germ of positive creativeness. Character is fate; and damn, I'd better work on my character. I had been withdrawing into a retreat of numbness: it is so much safer to NOT feel, NOT to let the world touch one. Votes: 0

I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on top of the beer can Votes: 0

When I fell out of the light, I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard. Votes: 0

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over. Votes: 0

I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord. Votes: 0

O heart, such disorganization! Votes: 0

A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife. Votes: 0

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Votes: 0

Don't talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen physical or psychological wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like. Votes: 0

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. To learn and think: to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love. Votes: 0

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds. Votes: 0

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. Votes: 0

Why am I obsessed with the idea I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published? Is it an escape-an excuse for any social failure-so I can say "No, I don't go out for many extracurricular activities, but I spend a lot of time writing." Votes: 0

And I sit here without identity: faceless. My head aches. Votes: 0

Ironically, Henry James' biography comforts me & I long to make known to him his posthumous reputation he wrote, in pain, gave all his life (which is more than I could think of doing I have Ted, will have children but few friends) & the critics insulted & mocked him, readers didn't read him. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought. Votes: 0

But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am. Votes: 0

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My lean, unripened heart. Votes: 0

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males, and in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady . . . I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others? Votes: 0

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists Votes: 0

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. Votes: 0

Happy! That is indefinable as far as states of being go. Votes: 0

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren't having any of those. Votes: 0

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right, White as a knuckle and terribly upset. It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. Votes: 0

I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead. Votes: 0

And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby. Votes: 0

To learn and think; to think and live; to live and learn: this always, with new insight, new understanding, and new love. Votes: 0

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I'm afraid for myself...the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. Votes: 0

Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent. Votes: 0

If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth. Votes: 0

The claw of the magnolia, drunk on its own scents, asks nothing of life. Votes: 0

I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye's darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body: I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard s study. Votes: 0

Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Votes: 0

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 individuals with a dull responsibility in life? Votes: 0

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 Votes: 0

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. Votes: 0

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was. Votes: 0

What I hate is the thought of being under a man's thumb," I had told Doctor Nolan. "A man doesn't have a worry in the world, while I've got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line. Votes: 0

I don't see what women see in other women," I'd told Doctor Nolan in my interview that noon. "What does a woman see in a woman that she can't see in a man?" Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, "Tenderness. Votes: 0

If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say that I'd thought they were made of candy and had eaten them. Votes: 0

I am myself. That is not enough. Votes: 0

Not being perfect hurts. Votes: 0

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night. Votes: 0

I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn't speak. Votes: 0

Mother of otherness, Eat me. Votes: 0

Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish. Votes: 0

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering. Votes: 0

And I, love, am a pathological liar, Votes: 0

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Votes: 0

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one's total human identity: past, present and future! Votes: 0

I am silver and exact.I have no preconceptions. Votes: 0

The man creates a pseudonym and hides behind it like a worm Votes: 0

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get. Votes: 0

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks. Votes: 0

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. Votes: 0

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' pour in from across the nation. Votes: 0

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air. Votes: 0

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try. Votes: 0

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 know what life is. Votes: 0

God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts. Votes: 0

The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces. Votes: 0

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me. Votes: 0

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 tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

Anonymous young men with all-American bone structures. Votes: 0

A time of darkness, despair, disillusion-so black only the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration Votes: 0

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. Votes: 0

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live. Votes: 0

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give. Votes: 0

How we need that security. 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. Votes: 0

I am terrified by this dark thingThat sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Votes: 0

Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill. Votes: 0

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I think I made you up inside my head. Votes: 0

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am. Votes: 0

The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions are different from a women's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly. Votes: 0

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. Votes: 0

I am your opus. Votes: 0

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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 led me to desire more, and to lash myself onward - onward. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful. Votes: 0

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money. Votes: 0

I talk to God but the sky is empty. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me. Votes: 0

Although, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burning tookPossession of the most obtuse objects now and then -- Votes: 0

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

A skeptic, I would ask for consistency first of all. Votes: 0

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song. Votes: 0

Is anyone anywhere happy~? Votes: 0

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Votes: 0

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 know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print~? Votes: 0

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacationWhere trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses Votes: 0

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom. Votes: 0

The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. Votes: 0

He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like. Votes: 0

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 people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning. Votes: 0

Ready for a new life Votes: 0

August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. Votes: 0

Some pale, hueless flicker of sensitivity is in me. God, must I lose it in cooking scrambled eggs for a man... Votes: 0

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin. Votes: 0

The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment. Votes: 0

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. Votes: 0

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss. Votes: 0

I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence...luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged. Votes: 0

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them. Votes: 0

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. Votes: 0

The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull. Votes: 0

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities. Votes: 0

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 order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head. Votes: 0

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows. Votes: 0

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable. Votes: 0

Strange, when one thinks of all the other boys, infinite experimental kisses, test tube infatuations, crushes, pseudo-loves. All through this physical separation, through the testing and the trying of the others, there has been this peculiar rapport, comradeship, of us two so alike, so similar, but for science-boy and humanities-girl - the introspection, self examination, biannual deep summarizing conversations, and then the platonic parting. Votes: 0

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth. Votes: 0

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. Votes: 0

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't. Votes: 0

It is so much safer not to feel, not to let the world touch me. Votes: 0

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever. Votes: 0

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. Votes: 0

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed. Votes: 0

This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's, but I knew that's what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard's mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself. Votes: 0

I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red. Votes: 0

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security. Votes: 0

Widow. The word consumes itself. Votes: 0

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. Votes: 0

Your room is not your prison. You are. Votes: 0

Every woman adores a Fascist. Votes: 0

If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen. Votes: 0

I am a victim of introspection. Votes: 0

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative - whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. Votes: 0

If you expect nothing from anybody, you're never disappointed. Votes: 0

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. Votes: 0

What I want back is what I was. Votes: 0

"* 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 gentleman's agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy, and try to catch the contagion of joy, while inside so many are dying of bitterness and unfulfillment" Votes: 0

"* 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 do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches. Votes: 0

"beating time along the edge of thought. Votes: 0

"I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me. Votes: 0

"'It always has to end, doesn't it? We always have to separate.' 'Yes,' I said. He was insistent, 'But it doesn't always have to be that way. We could be together some day for always.' 'Oh, no,' I told him, wondering if he knew it was all over. 'We keep running till we die. We separate, get further apart, till we are dead. Votes: 0

... I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb ... Votes: 0

... stop trying to get me to write about 'decent courageous people' -- read the Ladies' Home Journal for those! ... I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it. Votes: 0

... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people. Votes: 0

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real. Votes: 0

..I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.) Votes: 0

A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape Votes: 0

A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage. Votes: 0

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds... Votes: 0

A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. . . . My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it. Votes: 0

A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals. Votes: 0

A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief. Votes: 0

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use. Votes: 0

After all, we are nothing more or less than we choose to reveal. Votes: 0

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company. Votes: 0

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. Votes: 0

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. Votes: 0

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing. Votes: 0

And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber. Votes: 0

And there's the fallacy of existence: the idea that one could be happy forever and age with a given situation or series of accomplishments. Votes: 0

And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always. Votes: 0

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Votes: 0

And you grit your teeth, despising yourself for your tremulous sensitivity, and wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machinelike dictatorship, be it of industry, state or organization, all their lives long. Votes: 0

And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Of the millions, I, too, was potentially everything at birth. I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living — a set of values. Votes: 0

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know. Votes: 0

As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it. Votes: 0

Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. Votes: 0

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing? Votes: 0

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. Votes: 0

Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry. Votes: 0

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. Votes: 0

Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. Votes: 0

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream Votes: 0

But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper"I"I"I"I"I"I. Votes: 0

But I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all. How did I know that someday"•at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere"•the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again? Votes: 0

But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many"? Votes: 0

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew. Votes: 0

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good. Votes: 0

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile? Votes: 0

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? Votes: 0

Character is fate. Votes: 0

Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul. Votes: 0

Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal. Votes: 0

Compared with me, a tree is immortal. Votes: 0

Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse. Votes: 0

Death may whiten in sun or out of it. Votes: 0

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"? Votes: 0

Do we always grind through the present, doomed to throw a gold haze of fond retrospect over the past? Votes: 0

Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world. Votes: 0

Don't let the wicked city get you down. Votes: 0

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. Votes: 0

England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there. Votes: 0

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. Votes: 0

Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted. Votes: 0

Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy & peaceful. Votes: 0

Every day is precious and I feel infinitely sad at this time melting away from me. Votes: 0

Every day one has to earn the name of 'writer' over again, with much wrestling. Votes: 0

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. Votes: 0

Everything in life is writable... Votes: 0

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose. Votes: 0

For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt. Votes: 0

From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent. Votes: 0

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because it is impossible for me to be God — or the universal woman-and-man — or anything much. I am what I feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way. Votes: 0

Go out and do something. It isn't your room that's a prison, it's yourself. Votes: 0

God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies. Votes: 0

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering. Votes: 0

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain ... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility. No good. Votes: 0

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust? Votes: 0

God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis. Votes: 0

Good to know that if I ever need attention all I have to do is die. Votes: 0

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through. Votes: 0

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible. Votes: 0

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 know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print? Votes: 0

How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl? Votes: 0

How many different deaths I can die? Votes: 0

How we need another soul to cling to. Votes: 0

Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way"“and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity. Votes: 0

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love. Votes: 0

I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a dayspare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. Votes: 0

I am afraid of getting older " I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free". I want, I want to think, to be omniscient". I think I would like to call myself "˜The girl who wanted to be God. Votes: 0

I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence. Votes: 0

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered. Votes: 0

I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly. Votes: 0

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be. Votes: 0

I am I-I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I. Votes: 0

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. Votes: 0

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. Votes: 0

I am not cruel, only truthful. Votes: 0

I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love. Votes: 0

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is? Votes: 0

I am still raw. I say I may be back. You know what lies are for. Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet. Votes: 0

I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe? Votes: 0

I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one. Votes: 0

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me. Votes: 0

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill. Votes: 0

I am what I feel and think and do. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured...with an informed and intelligent mind. Votes: 0

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 it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. Votes: 0

I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Votes: 0

I can't deceive myself that out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. Votes: 0

I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated. Votes: 0

I collect men with interesting names. Votes: 0

I could feel the winter shaking my bones and banging my teeth together. Votes: 0

I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all. Votes: 0

I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to. Votes: 0

I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Votes: 0

I decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover, and that I would never learn a word of shorthand. If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it. Votes: 0

I deserve that, don't I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with. Votes: 0

I didn't know shorthand either. This meant I couldn't get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand would be something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters. Votes: 0

I didn't know what I was doing in New York. Votes: 0

I didn't really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did. Votes: 0

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To 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 asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. Votes: 0

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free. Votes: 0

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full. Votes: 0

I do not fear it: I have been there. Votes: 0

I do not know who I am tonight. Votes: 0

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions. Votes: 0

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. Votes: 0

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world. Votes: 0

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important. Votes: 0

I don't care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. Votes: 0

I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I dream too much, work too little. Votes: 0

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) Votes: 0

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) Votes: 0

I feel occasionally my skull will crack, fatigue is continuous - I only go from less exhausted to more exhausted & back again. Votes: 0

I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little. Votes: 0

I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing ... Votes: 0

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions. Votes: 0

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently. Votes: 0

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy. Votes: 0

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life. Votes: 0

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas. Votes: 0

I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him. Votes: 0

I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth. Votes: 0

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true. After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort and another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of race. Votes: 0

I felt wise and cynical as all hell. Votes: 0

I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it. Votes: 0

I guess they call it suicide, but I'm to full to swallow my pride I can't stand losing you The Police Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. Votes: 0

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself. Votes: 0

I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover. Votes: 0

I had hoped, at my departure, I would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead -- after all, I had been "analyzed." Instead, all I could see were question marks. Votes: 0

I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out. Votes: 0

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous. Votes: 0

I hate Technicolor. Everybody in a Technicolor movie seems to feel obliged to wear a lurid costume in each new scene and to stand around like a clotheshorse with a lot of very green trees or very yellow wheat or very blue ocean rolling away for miles and miles in every direction. Votes: 0

I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood. Votes: 0

I have been holding a dialogue with myself and girding myself to stand fast without running. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. Votes: 0

I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful. Votes: 0

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ Votes: 0

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Votes: 0

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. Votes: 0

I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that. Votes: 0

I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if I am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing. I am, on the contrary, something: a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily. Votes: 0

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. Votes: 0

I hurl my heart to halt his pace. Votes: 0

I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches. Votes: 0

I knew you'd decide to be all right again. Votes: 0

I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain. Votes: 0

I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near unto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but I guess I feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water. Votes: 0

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here. Votes: 0

I like people too much or not at all. Votes: 0

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them. Votes: 0

I like people, but to learn about one individual always appeals to me more than anything. Votes: 0

I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much. Votes: 0

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time. Votes: 0

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn. Votes: 0

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. Votes: 0

I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives. Votes: 0

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. Votes: 0

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more. Votes: 0

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 milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more... Votes: 0

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in. Votes: 0

I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow. Votes: 0

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it. Votes: 0

I must learn more about these people"•try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is. Votes: 0

I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked. Votes: 0

I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds. Votes: 0

I need the reality of other people, work, to fulfill myself. Must never become a mere mother and housewife. Votes: 0

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. Votes: 0

I opened the door and blinked out into the bright hall. I had the impression it wasn't night and it wasn't day, but some lurid third interval that had suddenly slipped between them and would never end. Votes: 0

I said: I must remember this, being small. Votes: 0

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant loosing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. Votes: 0

I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next day had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue. Votes: 0

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality- She lay in bed with me like a dead body And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I couldn't sleep for a week she was so cold. Votes: 0

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) Votes: 0

I started adding up all the things I couldn't do. Votes: 0

I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic. Votes: 0

I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid. Votes: 0

I think I am mad sometimes. Votes: 0

I think I am worthwhile just because I have optical nerves and can try to put down what they perceive. What a fool! Votes: 0

I think I made you up inside my head. Votes: 0

I think I may well be a Jew. Votes: 0

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. Votes: 0

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him. Votes: 0

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. Votes: 0

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 trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth. Votes: 0

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow. Votes: 0

I tried to speak in a cool, calm way, but the zombie rose up in my throat and choked me off. Votes: 0

I used to pray to recover you. Votes: 0

I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. Votes: 0

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same. Votes: 0

I want to be silverly beautiful. Votes: 0

I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. Votes: 0

I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls. Votes: 0

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb. Votes: 0

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. Votes: 0

I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. Votes: 0

I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket. Votes: 0

I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come. Votes: 0

I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it. Votes: 0

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed. Votes: 0

I was my own woman. The next step was to find the proper sort of man. Votes: 0

I wish you'd find the exit out of my head. Votes: 0

I woke to the sound of rain. Votes: 0

I wondered what I thought I was burying. Votes: 0

I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn't do at all. Votes: 0

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still Votes: 0

I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses. Votes: 0

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh. Votes: 0

I'd discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty. Votes: 0

If every soldier refused to take arms ... there would be no wars; but no one has the courage to be the first to live according to Christ and Socrates, because in a world of opportunists they would be martyred. Votes: 0

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier. Votes: 0

If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time. Votes: 0

If I have a dry spell ... I wait and live harder, eyes, ears, and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer. Votes: 0

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. Votes: 0

If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, for as long as I possibly could. Votes: 0

If only a group of people were more important to me than the idea of a Novel, I might begin a novel. Votes: 0

If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man? Votes: 0

If only I knew what I wanted I could try to see about getting it. Votes: 0

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Votes: 0

If there's anything I look down on, it's a man in a blue outfit. Votes: 0

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter - - - for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.... Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. Votes: 0

If you have no past or no future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide. But the cold reasoning mass of gray entrail in my cranium which parrots, "˜I think, therefore I am,' whispers that there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait. Votes: 0

If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday. Votes: 0

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love. Votes: 0

I'll never speak to God again. Votes: 0

I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill. Votes: 0

I'm never going to get married." "You're crazy." Buddy brightened. "You'll change your mind." "No. My mind's made up. Votes: 0

I'm sarcastic, skeptical, and sometimes callous because I'm still afraid, deep down, of letting myself be hurt. Votes: 0

In a rabbit-fear I may hurl myself under the wheels of the car because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of wheels I will be safe. I am very tired, very banal, very confused. I do not know who I am tonight. I wanted to walk until I dropped and not complete the inevitable circle of coming home. Votes: 0

In spite of everything, I still have my good old sense of humor. Votes: 0

Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness Votes: 0

Is anyone anywhere happy? Votes: 0

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it. Votes: 0

Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar. Votes: 0

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles. Votes: 0

It is a terrible thing to be so open: it is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world. Votes: 0

It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. Votes: 0

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere. Votes: 0

It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries. Votes: 0

It never occurred to me to say no. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar. Votes: 0

It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water. Votes: 0

It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt) Votes: 0

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn't matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more. Votes: 0

It won't happen yet, Ellen mused, mashing cooked carrots for Jill's lunch. Breakups seldom do. It will unfold slowly, one little tell-tale symptom after another like some awful, hellish flower. Votes: 0

It's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all. Votes: 0

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual" Votes: 0

I've eaten a bag of Green apples. Boarded the train, there's no getting off Votes: 0

Jealousy can open the blood, it can make black roses. Votes: 0

Joy:show joy & enjoy: then others will be joyful. Votes: 0

Last year a friend went dark in a nervous city alone, the sea flashing against his glasses, the sea sorted out at last in his inner ear so he could leave this world as he'd entered it through the undependable irrational influence of water. -Kevin Jeffery Clark It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at. Votes: 0

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals. Votes: 0

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium. Votes: 0

Let's face it: I'm scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess I'm afraid for myself... the old primitive urge for survival. It's getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder. Votes: 0

Like a cat I have nine times to die. Votes: 0

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Votes: 0

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. Votes: 0

Love life day by day, color by color, touch by touch. Votes: 0

Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses. Votes: 0

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Votes: 0

Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape. Votes: 0

My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death. Votes: 0

My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing. Votes: 0

My wanting to write books annihilates the original root impulse that would have me bravely and blunderingly working on them. Votes: 0

My worst habit is my fear & my destructive rationalizing. Votes: 0

No day is safe from news of you. Votes: 0

No, I won't try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter 'Did you have a nice vacation?' 'Oh, yes, and you?' I'll stay here and try to pin that loneliness down. Votes: 0

Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don't want to die. Votes: 0

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have a pure motive (O it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing. Votes: 0

Now I am silent, hate Up to my neck, Thick, thick. I do not speak. Votes: 0

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self - - like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion. Votes: 0

O love, how did you get here? --Nick and the Candlestick Votes: 0

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into. Votes: 0

On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping. Votes: 0

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Votes: 0

One night she hid the pink cotton scarf from her raincoat in the pillowcase when the nurse came around to lock up her drawers and closets for the night. In the dark she had made a loop and tried to pull it tight around her throat. But always just as the air stopped coming and she felt the rushing grow louder in her ears, her hands would slacken and let go, and she would lie there panting for breath, cursing the dumb instinct in her body that fought to go on living Votes: 0

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering. Votes: 0

Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. Votes: 0

Opinions are like orgasms...mine matters most and I really don't care if you have one. Votes: 0

Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass. Votes: 0

Over coffee and orange juice the embryonic suicide brightens visibly. Votes: 0

People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. Votes: 0

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. Votes: 0

Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Votes: 0

Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge. Votes: 0

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York. Votes: 0

Please don't expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand. Votes: 0

Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun. Votes: 0

Please, I want so badly for the good things to happen. Votes: 0

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals. Votes: 0

Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to use my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending. Votes: 0

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. Votes: 0

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing. Votes: 0

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life. Votes: 0

She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony. Votes: 0

Slowly, slowly, catch the monkey. Votes: 0

So I kiss him, and there is the great dark sea ahead... Votes: 0

So learn about life. Cut yourself a big slice with the silver server, a big slice of pie. Open your eyes. Let life happen. Votes: 0

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough. Votes: 0

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won't matter when I rot underground. All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted. And so life goes. Votes: 0

So you got rid of your astonishment that someone could write so much more dynamically than you. You stopped cherishing your aloneness and poetic differentness to your delicately flat little bosom. You said: she's to good to forget. How about making her a friend and competitor — you could learn alot from her. So you'll try. So maybe she'll laugh in your face. So maybe she'll beat you hollow in the end. So anyhow, you'll try, and maybe, possibly, she can stand you. Here's hoping! Votes: 0

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 ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. Votes: 0

Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence. Votes: 0

Sometimes I feel so stupid and dull and uncreative that I am amazed when people tell me differently. Votes: 0

Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image. Votes: 0

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls. Votes: 0

Sure, I'm dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself. Votes: 0

Talking about my fears to others feeds it. Votes: 0

That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously. Votes: 0

That's one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket. Votes: 0

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete. Votes: 0

The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain. Votes: 0

The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind. Votes: 0

The box is only temporary. Votes: 0

The day I went into physics class it was death. Votes: 0

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality. Votes: 0

The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. Votes: 0

The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther. Votes: 0

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past. Votes: 0

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump. Votes: 0

The lawn was white with doctors Votes: 0

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. Votes: 0

The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag. Votes: 0

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. Votes: 0

The moon, too, abases her subjects, but in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me. Votes: 0

The more hopeless you were, the further away they hid you. Votes: 0

The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words. Votes: 0

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. Votes: 0

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out. Votes: 0

The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down. Votes: 0

The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault. Votes: 0

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Votes: 0

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals. Votes: 0

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful. Votes: 0

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time. Votes: 0

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it. Votes: 0

The tulips are too red...they hurt me. Votes: 0

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. Votes: 0

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel. Votes: 0

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. Votes: 0

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get. Votes: 0

There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart - It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge, For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. Votes: 0

There is more than one good way to drown. Votes: 0

There is no life higher than the grasstops Votes: 0

There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears. Votes: 0

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour. Votes: 0

There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road. Votes: 0

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Votes: 0

They would grow old. They would forget me. Votes: 0

This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat. Votes: 0

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. Votes: 0

To annihilate the world by annihilation of oneself is the deluded height of desperate egoism. Votes: 0

To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand. Votes: 0

Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens. Votes: 0

Tomorrow is another day toward death. Votes: 0

We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine. Votes: 0

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves. Votes: 0

we walk the plank with strangers. Votes: 0

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,' and, "˜What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from. Votes: 0

What did my arms do before they held you? Votes: 0

What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? Votes: 0

What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. Votes: 0

What have I eaten? Lies and smiles. Votes: 0

What I cannot forgive is dishonesty - and no matter what, or how hard, I would rather know the truth of which I today had such a clear & devastating vision from his mouth than hear foul evasions, blurrings and rattiness. Votes: 0

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. Votes: 0

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. Votes: 0

What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. Votes: 0

What is so real as the cry of a child? Votes: 0

What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit's cry may be wilder But it has no soul. Votes: 0

When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants or Republicans and Democrats or white men and black men or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn't, and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another. Votes: 0

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything. Votes: 0

When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time ... when I was crazy, that was all I was. Votes: 0

Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath. Votes: 0

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming? Votes: 0

Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled "enemy? Votes: 0

Why honey, don't you want to get dressed?" My mother took care never to tell me to do anything. She would only reason with me sweetly, like one intelligent, mature person with another. It's almost three in the afternoon." I'm writing a novel," I said. "I haven't got time to change into this and change into that. Votes: 0

Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. Votes: 0

Winter is for women The woman still at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think. Votes: 0

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 have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start. Votes: 0

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence. Votes: 0

Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night... Votes: 0

You are a dream; I hope I never meet you. Votes: 0

You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn. Votes: 0

You ask me why I spend my life writing? Do I find entertainment? Is it worthwhile? Above all, does it pay? If not, then, is there a reason?... I write only because there is a voice within me. That will not be still. Votes: 0

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time... Votes: 0

You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors. Votes: 0

You have to be able to make a real creative life for Yourself, before you can expect anyone Else to provide one ready-made for you. Votes: 0

You know what lies are for. Votes: 0

You smile. No, it is not fatal. Votes: 0

You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl? Votes: 0

Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God Votes: 0

You've only got so long to live. Votes: 0