On a low coffee table, with circular and semicircular stains bitten into the dark veneer, lay a few wilted numbers of Time and Life. I flipped to the middle of the nearest magazine. The face of Eisenhower beamed up at me, bald and blank as the face of a fetus in a bottle.
I also hate people to ask cheerfully how you are when they know you’re feeling like hell and expect you to say “fine.
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.
It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.
After all, I wasn’t crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn’t know when to stop.
People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.
After nineteen years of running after good marks and prizes and grants of one sort or another, I was letting up, slowing down, dropping clean out of the race.
All I’d heard about, really, was how fine and clean Buddy was and how he was the kind of person a girl should stay fine and clean for. So I didn’t really see the harm in anything Buddy would think up to do.
His eyelashes were so long and thick they looked artificial. Black plastic reeds fringing two green, glacial pools.
Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.
Why can’t I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is more becoming?
Girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.
Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.
I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.
The hardest thing is to live richly in the present without letting it be tainted out of fear for the future or regret for the past.
I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.