I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.
My biggest trouble is that people look at me and think that no serious trouble has ever troubled my little head. They seldom realize the chaos that seethes behind my exterior. As for the who Am I, what am I angle... that will preoccupy me till the day I die.
Every so often a beam of light appeared out of thin air, traversed the wall like a ghostly, exploratory finger, and slid off into nothing again.
I am part man, and I notice women’s breasts and thighs with the calculation of a man choosing a mistress... but that is the artist and the analytical attitude toward the female body... for I am more a woman; even as I long for full breasts and a beautiful body, so do I abhor the sensuousness which they bring... I desire the things which will destroy me in the end...
On a striped mattress in one room An old man is vanishing.
Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.
I had a suspicion that my mother had called Jody and begged her to ask me out, so I wouldn’t sit around in my room all day with the shades drawn. I didn’t want to go at first, because I thought Jody would notice the change in me, and that anybody with half an eye would see I didn’t have a brain in my head.
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
I remembered a worrisome course in the Victorian novel where woman after woman died, palely and nobly, in torrents of blood, after a difficult childbirth.
Nada melhor do que vomitar com outra pessoa para ganhar intimidade.
Facevo collezione di uomini con nomi interessanti.
On a wonderful thing – Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood, And a naked mouth, red and awkward. For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
I felt moved and tender and perfectly certain about what I was going to do.
Nothing. Nothing but a great, amiable boredom.
My Aunt Libby’s husband had made a joke once, about a nun that a nunnery sent to Teresa for a checkup. This nun kept hearing harp notes in her ears and a voice saying over and over, “Alleluia!” Only she wasn’t sure, on being closely questioned, whether the voice was saying Alleluia or Arizona. The nun had been born in Arizona. I think she ended up in some asylum.
These girls looked awfully bored to me. I saw them on the sunroof, yawning and painting their nails and trying to keep up their Bermuda tans, and they seemed bored as hell. I talked with one of them, and she was bored with yachts and bored with flying around in airplanes and bored with skiing in Switzerland at Christmas and bored with the men in Brazil.
I shall be, in the future, omnipresent.
Then something leapt out of the lamp in a blue flash and shook me till my teeth rattled, and I tried to pull my hands off, but they were stuck, and I screamed, or a scream was torn from my throat, for I didn’t recognize it, but heard it soar and quaver in the air like a violently disembodied spirit.
I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see trees and grassland waist-high under flood water – as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.
Jay Cee wanted to teach me something, all the old ladies I ever knew wanted to teach me something, but I suddenly didn’t think they had anything to teach me. I fitted the lid on my typewriter and clicked it shut.