It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.
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.
Buddy was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn't breathe. I thought this an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead.
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.
Widow. The word consumes itself.
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 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 am unattached; My heart is very quiet.
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.
Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes— A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers. Even our shadows are blue with cold. We wanted to see the sun come up And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship, Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost, Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay Encased in a glassy pellicle.
I said: I must remember this, being small.
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.
Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best.
Kiss me and you'll know how important I am.
I wish you'd find the exit out of my head.
Even the apostles were tentmakers...
Love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart.
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...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?
In the heart of the forest, your image follows me.
So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.
The dress was cut so queerly I couldn't wear any sort of a bra under it, but that didn't matter much as I was skinny as a boy and barely rippled, and I liked feeling almost naked on the hot summer nights.
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?
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.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Who do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled 'enemy?
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.
You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not.
I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.
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 coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
I used to pray to recover you.
Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it's the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.
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.
The faces were empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.
The soprano screak of carriage wheels punished my ear.
I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I would respect him.
On Fridays the little children come To trade their hooks for hands. Dead men leave eyes for others. Love is the uniform of my bald nurse. Love is the bone and sinew of my curse. The vase, reconstructed, houses The elusive rose. Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows. My mendings itch. There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new.
Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
Perhaps, perhaps this would be the one to pull me out of my plunge.
After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.
The box is only temporary.
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.
I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk.
Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.
How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?
I suppose I'll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid.
And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.
I waited, as if the sea could make my decision for me.
How clever of them, I thought. They kept the feeling all secret; they wouldn't even let you write it down.
