I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.
I felt sorry when I came to the last page. I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print the way you crawl through a fence.
And round her house she set Such a barricade of barb and check Against mutinous weather As no mere insurgent man could hope to break With curse, fist, threat Or love, either.
And of course I didn’t know who would marry me now that I’d been where I had been. I didn’t know at all.
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I’ll go take a hot bath.
As I paddled on, mt heartbeat boomed like a motor in my ears. I am I am I am.
I decided to expect nothing from Buddy Willard. If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod or damp. A mottled brown linoleum sealed off the floor.
He could almost have been an American, he was so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight away that he wasn’t. He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had, and that’s intuition.
They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disembowelled themselves when anything went wrong.
They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.
Your shelled bed I remember. Father, this thick air is murderous. I would breathe water.
The big men are all deaf; they don’t want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street on cleated boots.
I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else.
Sometimes I wondered if I had made Joan up. Other times I wondered if she would continue to pop in at every crisis of my life to remind me of what I had been, and what I had been through, and carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.
And we, too, had a relationship – Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.
Be stoic when necessary and write-you have seen a lot, felt deeply, and your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful-WRITE.
A small, answering point in my own body flew towards it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.
People or stars regard me sadly. I disappoint them.
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.