"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."
"I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here."
" 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."
" 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."
" The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
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 one hour more of sleep and live."
"I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’"
"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. "
Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of
the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and
overpowering.
The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther
I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.
What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
What did my heart do, with its love?
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.
Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.
... 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.
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or
introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in
between.
If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
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.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the
story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful
future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and
children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig
was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with
queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady
crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I
couldn’t quite make out. 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 losing 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.
