I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it. The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks...
After all, I am alive only by accident.
You leave the same impression of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers.
How clear, how lovely. Now just write the damn thing.
Love Is a Parallax.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
My love for you is more athletic than a verb, agile as a star the tents of sun absorb.
There are no return trips on this line,” the woman said softly. “Once you get to the ninth kingdom, there is no going back. It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will. It has many names.
Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long. You’ve got to be able to talk. That’s tough. But spend your nights learning, so you’ll have something to say.
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 same thing happened over and over:.
I am learning how to compromise the wild dream ideals and the necessary realities without such screaming pain.
The sweaty cotton gave off a sour but friendly smell.
Do vegetarians rot more rapidly than meat-eaters?
May 13 – today I bought a raincoat – no, that was yesterday – yesterday I bought a raincoat with a frivolous pink lining that does good to my eyes because I have never ever had anything pink-colored, and it was much too expensive.
Another day of hell. He is on the prowl, all the fiends are come to torment me: and I alone am escaped to tell thee.
What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches? I felt shut in, imprisoned, aware that it was fine and shudderingly beautiful, but too gone with pain and aching to respond and become part of.
Well, after this Racine paper, this Ronsard-purgatory, this Sophocles, I shall write: letters and prose and poetry, toward the end of the week; I must be stoic till then.
I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted gray suit, rattling off idiom after idiom in her own unknowable tongue – which Constantin said was the most difficult part, because the Russians didn’t have the same idioms as our idioms – and I wished with all my heart I could crawl into her and spend the rest of my life barking out one idiom after another. it mightn’t make me any happier, but would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.
I suppose if you can write sestinas which bam crash through lines and rules after having raped them to the purpose, then you can be satanic and smile like a cretin beelzebub.
Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.