No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
I don’t really know,′ I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.
I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.
The faces were empty as plates, and nobody seemed to be breathing.
I needed experience. How Could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die?
I have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, with her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
I am I because of that.
I felt it was very important not to be recognized.
A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.
Avocados are my favourite fruit.
All the gods know is destinations.
Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms.
Unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long. You’ve got to be able to talk. Spend your nights learning, so you’ll have something to say. Something the “attractive intelligent man” will want to listen to.
This hotel-the Amazon- was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.
Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for 19 years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car. Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus.
I can’t take things as they come, or make them come as I choose.
Then bed, and again the luxury of dark. Still the blood and flesh of me were electric and singing quietly. But it ebbed and ebbed and dark and sleep and oblivion came and came, surging, surging, surging inward, lapping and drowning with no-name, no-identity, none at all. Just nothing, yet the seeds of awakening and life slumbered there in the dark.
Wondering how human beings can suffer their individualities to be mercilessly crushed under a machine-like dictatorship – be it of industry, state or organization – all their lives long.
I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.
I said to myself: Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter any more. I don’t know them, I have never known them and I am very pure. All that liquor and those sticky kisses I saw and the dirt that settled on my skin on the way back is turning into something pure.