"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."

Ennui
Tea-leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
Designing futures where nothing will occur.
Cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
Will still predict no perils left to conquer.

Jeopardy is jejune now: the naïve knight
Finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard-of,
While blasé princesses indict
Tilts at terror as downright absurd.

The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
Compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
And when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
While bored arena crowds for once look eager,
Hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prices
Shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.

"My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful."

"The still watersWrap my lips,Eyes, nose and ears,A clearCellophane I cannot crack."

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

"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."

"This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, 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 newTo want the world in a glass hat."

"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."

"Usually after a good puke you feel better right away. We hugged each other and then said good-bye and went off to opposite ends of the hall to lie down in our own rooms. There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends."

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

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

"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."

"What is so real as the cry of a child?A rabbit's cry may be wilderBut it has no soul."

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

"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?"

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

"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."

"Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon."

"The tongues of hell are dull."

"It seems this is an age of clever critics who keep bewailing the fact that there are no works worthy of criticism."

"You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion."

"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."

"There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side. God, but life is loneliness, despite 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 it's appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering."

"You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion."

"I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full."

"The reason why I hadn't washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.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 had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.It made me tired just to think of it.I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it."

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

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

"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."

"But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good."

"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."

"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."

"I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives."

"I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses."

"Writing sharpens life, life enriches writing."

"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."

"I am not cruel -only truthful."

"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."

"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."

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad."

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

"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."

"I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died."

"Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work."

"I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not."

"I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry."

"I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here 'freelance' and perhaps shall join the Labour Club, as I really want to become informed on politics, and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter."

"I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies."

"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."

"I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me."