I felt the first man I slept with must be intelligent, so I could respect him.
They would grow old. They would forget me.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I collect men with interesting names.
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.
What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security.
I didn’t really see why people should look at me. Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn’t pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.
It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.
I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, ‘Ah!’ in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn’t, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out.
But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
I hurl my heart to halt his pace.
Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.
And what is happy? It is a going always on. There is something better to be done than I have done, and spurred by the fair delusion of progress, I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more- to learning. Always.
I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us.
If Doctor Nolan asked me for the matches, I would say that I’d thought they were made of candy and had eaten them.
I hadn’t, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.
I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.
I think I may well be a Jew.