Girl, aging girl, is haunted by own nothingness...
There was no absence of lips, there were two children, But their bones showed, and the moon smiled.
When we came out of the sunnily lit interior of the Ladies’ Day offices, the streets were gray and fuming with rain. It wasn’t the nice kind of rain that rinses. you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete.
What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?” Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, “Tenderness.” That shut me up.
I am furious with myself. My disguises no longer protect me.
And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a redblooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn’t pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well.
Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.
Eccentricities, the perils of being too special, were reasoned and cooed from us like sucked thumbs.
Whenever I thought about men and men, and women and women, I could never really imagine what they would actually be doing.
Something maternal awakened, perhaps, by the physical contact with such lovely young babies? And tonight was a good night, thus I feel correspondingly tender. There will be other bad nights, but remembering the versatile quicksilver shifting of children’s moods, I smile with equanimity and do not cherish grudges, as most of us adults do, letting them fester like a cancer. But I let my emotions run on the same forgiving and transient track.
Our democracy is of no use to those who have not been educated to it. Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it.
I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me.
Jay Cee’s ugly as sin.
I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.
The tongues of hell are dull.
Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves.
It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one.
As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate – – inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.
If I had to strain my brain with any more of that stuff I would go mad.