You wonder if you’ve got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next. It made me tired just to think of it. I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
He’s lonely, that’s all. So am I. Well, I’d rather be lonely than be with the wrong person.
Since my woman’s world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing – and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.
I wonder if art divorced from normal and conventional living is as vital as art combined with living: in a word, would marriage sap my creative energy and annihilate my desire for written and pictorial expression which increases with this depth of unsatisfied emotion... or would I achieve a fuller expression in art as well as in the creation of children?
They had the windows fixed so you couldn’t really open them and lean out, and for some reason this made me furious.
In Chicago, people would take me for what I was.
I don’t believe in baptism or the waters of Jordan or anything like that, but i guess i feel about a hot bath the way those religious people feel about holy water.
I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything.
The human mind is so limited it can only build an arbitrary heaven – and usually the physical comforts they endow it with are naively the kind that can be perceived as we humans perceive – nothing more.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.
The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.
The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being bummed alive all along your nerves.
Write about the cow, Mrs. Spaulding’s heavy eyelids, the smell of vanilla flavoring in a brown bottle. That’s where the magic mountains begin.
I told Buddy how sorry I was about the TB and promised to write, but when I hung up I didn’t feel one bit sorry. I only felt a wonderful relief.
I’m very interested in everything.” The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee’s desk, like so many wooden nickels.
And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault after fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him... The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.
I can only end up with one, and I must leave many lonely by the wayside. So that is all for now. Perhaps someday someone will leave me by the wayside. And that will be poetic justice.
It flew straight down.
There is nothing like.