Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.
How best beauty’s born of hardihood.
The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoot off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in al directions myself.
It influenced my life that I did not find content immediately and easily – – and now I am I because of that.
If there’s anything I look down on, it’s a man in a blue outfit. Black or gray, or brown, even. Blue just makes me laugh.
He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and french dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce.
What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. 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. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol. I crawl like an ant in mourning over the weedy acres of your brow to mend the immense skull-plates and clear the bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of Oresteia...
A meeting of the lips. that is all, animal as we are, that is our own particular generic peculiarity. And yet, without being vague and star-eyed, I may say that a kiss may be a physical symbol of a mental adoration. That, and a delight.
I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of non-feeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.
The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.
Of course, I didn’t know he was a hypocrite at first. I thought he was the most wonderful boy I’d ever seen. I’d adored him from a distance for five years before he even looked at me, and then there was a beautiful time when I still adored him and he started looking at me, and then just as he was looking at me more and more I discovered quite by accident what an awful hypocrite he was, and now he wanted to marry me and I hated his guts.
For instance, I could hold my nose, close my eyes, and jump blindly into the waters of some man’s insides, submerging myself until his purpose becomes my purpose, his life, my life, and so on. One fine day I would float to the surface, quite drowned, and supremely happy with my newfound selfless self.
So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative – to be disposed of only when desperation sets in.
But Doctor Gordon wasn’t like that at all. He was young and good-looking, and I could see right away he was conceited.
Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.
Joan fascinated me. It was like observing a Martian, or a particularly warty toad. Her thoughts were not my thoughts, nor her feelings my feelings, but we were close enough so that her thoughts and feelings seemed a wry, black image of my own.
I had never been to Chicago, but I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.
Ho talmente riempito la mia riserva di giorni e maschere che adesso posso e devo passare gli anni a pescare, a tirar su mostri dagli occhi di perla, coriacei, squamosi e con barbe marine, sommersi da lungo tempo nel mar dei Sargassi della mia immaginazione.
I thought it would be the way I’d feel if I ever visited Europe. I’d come home, and if I looked closely into the mirror I’d be able to make out a little white Alp at the back of my eye.