I crawled back into bed and pulled the sheet over my head. But even that didn’t shut out the light, so I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
In the heart of the forest your image follows me.
I made a decision about Doreen that night. I decided I would watch her and listen to what she said, but deep down I would have nothing at all to do with her.
I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. It felt dark and safe under there, but the mattress was not heavy enough. It needed about a ton more weight to make me sleep.
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.
Writing sharpens life; life enriches writing.
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?
This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.
The room hovered around me with great gentleness, as if the chairs and the tables and the walls were withholding their weight out of sympathy for my sudden frailty.
You’re still vulnerable, because you still don’t have faith in yourself, you talk a little fliply, a little too wisely, just to cover up so you won’t be accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or feminine tactics.
She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.
It was a face that needed soap and water and Christian tolerance.
You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns-.
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.
Though it’s quite clear all your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, from me.
It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days. And when I eventually did decide to do something, such as packing a suitcase, I only dragged all my grubby, expensive clothes out of the bureau and the closet and spread them on the chairs and the bed and the floor and then sat and stared at them, utterly perplexed. They seemed to have a separate, mulish identity of their own that refused to be washed and folded and stowed.
I am a part of all that I have met.” To you, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something. There is nothing but that it will suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Through me transmuted.
Her ambition to write stories was the most visible burden of her life.
I tried to think what I had loved knives for, but my mind slipped from the noose of the thought and swung, like a bird, in the centre of empty air.
I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.