"This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals."

"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."

"I'm not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else."

"Amazing how money would simplify problems like ours. We wouldn't go wild at all, but write & travel & study all of our lives - which I hope we do anyway. And have a house apart, by the side of no road, with country about & a study & walls of bookcases."

"I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself."

"Kiss me and you will see how important I am."

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

"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."

"I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.It would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast andcoffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. 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."

"A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it."

"There was a beautiful time..."

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

"We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you."

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

"If a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul,body and pride of man?"

"I didn't want any flowers, I only wantedTo 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."

"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."

"Talking about my fears to others feeds it."

"When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know."

"This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but assoon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up by making her lifemiserable."

"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."

"I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.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 onto 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."

"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."

"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."

"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."

"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed."

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

"Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content."

"My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."I looked at her. "Like what?""Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again."

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

"I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air."

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

"The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven - and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive - nothing more. No: perhaps I will awake to find myself burning in hell. I think not. I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death, with no light, no waking."

"Is there no way out of the mind?"

"Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm."

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here."

"All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence."