Those words spoke to my heart with peace, as if in comment, kindly, on my life, my days.
175 The Courage of Shutting-Up The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery! The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking. There are black disks behind it, the disks of outrage, And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it. The disks revolve, they ask to be heard – Loaded, as they are, with accounts of bastardies.
I hadn’t slept for seven nights. My mother told me I must have slept, it was impossible not to sleep in all that time, but if I slept, it was with my eyes wide open, for I had followed the green, luminous course of the second hand and the minute hand and the hour hand of the bedside clock through their circles and semi-circles, every night for seven nights, without missing a second, or a minute, or an hour.
We get well first, then we work.
I never really liked Buddy Willard. He thought he knew everything. He thought he knew everything about women...
Meanwhile, read Hopkins for solace.
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 should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
Very simply, you were not wise to give me your image. You should know your woman, and be kind. You expect too much of me; you know I am not strong enough to live merely in that abstract Platonic realm out of time and flesh on the other side of all those mirrors.
Where do you stash your life?
I felt nothing. Then I felt a small, deep thrill, and a bright seam of red welled up at the lip of the slash. The blood gathered darkly, like fruit, and rolled down my ankle into the cup of my black patent leather shoe.
My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck. It had been of such enormous importance to me for so long that my habit was to defend it at all costs. I had been defending it for five years and I was sick of it.
I cannot undo myself.
How I would like to believe in tenderness.
Her college was so fashion-conscious, she said, that all the girls had pocket-book covers made out of the same material as their dresses, so each time they changed their clothes they had a matching pocket-book. This kind of detail impressed me. It suggested a whole life of marvellous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet.
I fought and fought to free myself as from the weight of a name that could be a baby or could be a malignant tumor; I knew not. I only feared.
My mother was the worst. She never scolded me, but kept begging me, with a sorrowful face, to tell her what she had done wrong.
Especially after I read Pete DeVries recent scintillant “Afternoon of a Faun.” There are ways and ways to have a love affair. Above all, one must not be serious about it.
This part of the woman in me, the concrete, present, immediate part, which needs the warmth of her man in bed and her man eating with her and her man thinking and communing with her soul: this part still cries to you:.
I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations... I certainly learned a lot of things this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time.