I beamed benevolently at them over my third atheistic cup of coffee and ate my existentialist egg.
I write and think and study perfectly when with him; apart, I’m split and only can work properly in brief, stoic spells.
All my life I’d told myself studying and reading and writing and working like mad was what I wanted to do, and it actually seemed to be true.
I made a point of never living in the same house with my mother for more than a week.
What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that “shaping” force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning.
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.
I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears 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 really love this city above any I’ve ever been in; it is dear and graceful and elegant and what one makes it.
His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for something, but I couldn’t think what it would be short for, unless it was California.
When Ted and I begin living together we shall become a team better than Mr. and Mrs. Yeats.
I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of the primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee, and De Chirico.
It is as if, by concentrating on the “inscape”, as Hopkins says, of leaf and plant and animal, I can know the world a new and special way; and make up my own versions of it.
In March I’ll be rested, caught up and human.
I want so obviously, so desperately to be loved, and to be capable of love. I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again.
What happens between us Happens in darkness, vanishes Easy and often as each breath.
My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.
What holes this papery day is already full of! He has been burning me with cigarettes.
What the hell is tragedy? I am.
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?