Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).
I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.
I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly happy, My wellingtons Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends.
If I didn't think, I'd be much happier; if I didn't have any sex organs, I wouldn't waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time.
I don't know how long I kept at it... I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still. It didn't seem to be summer any more
Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?
Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.
Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.
I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness
She looks like a woman who has found it ridiculous to commit herself to a single emotional stance in anything, but must always ride high heavy irony.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.
There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.
I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
I can't think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated.
I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.
So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.
I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.
I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.
I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.
Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.
Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind.
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.
A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
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.
Sometimes I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow. There's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence.
I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little.
Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.
As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.
There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
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.
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.
A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, It can talk, talk, talk. . . . My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.
Miracles occur, If you dare to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again, The long wait for the angel, For that rare, random descent.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
If only I can find him... the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn't I expect it in a man?
I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured...with an informed and intelligent mind.
I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.