Quote collection
610 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?"
"I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.)"
"When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know."
"I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me."
"Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever."
"What did my arms do before they held you?"
"If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love."
"The future is what matters — because one never reaches it, but always stays in the present — like the White Queen who had to run like the wind to remain in the same spot."
"I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly."
"There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice - patched, retreaded and approved for the road."
"Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master."
"The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower."
"I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in."
"I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted."
"I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us."
"All the heat and fear had purged itself. I felt surprisingly at peace. The bell jar hung suspended a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air."
"I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them."
"You are the one. Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn."
"Outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass."
"But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it."