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I Must Say What I Admire Most Is The Person Who Masters An Area Of Practical Experience, And Can Teach Me Something. I Mean, My Local Midwife Has Taught Me How To Keep Bees. Well, She Can't Understand Anything I Write. And I Find Myself Liking Her, May I Say, More Than Most Poets. And Among My Friends I Find People Who Know All About Boats Or Know All About Certain Sports, Or How To Cut Somebody Open And Remove An Organ. I'm Fascinated By This Mastery Of The Practical.

-Sylvia Plath

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I Must Say What

Sylvia Plath

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I Must Say What I Admire Most Is The Person Who Masters An Area Of Practical Experience, And Can Teach Me Something. I Mean, My Local Midwife Has Taught Me How To Keep Bees. Well, She Can't Understand Anything I Write. And I Find Myself Liking Her, May I Say, More Than Most Poets. And Among My Friends I Find People Who Know All About Boats Or Know All About Certain Sports, Or How To Cut Somebody Open And Remove An Organ. I'm Fascinated By This Mastery Of The Practical.

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The Claw Of The Magnolia, Drunk On Its Own Scents, Asks Nothing Of Life.

Go Out And Do Something. It Isn’t Your Room That’s A Prison, It’s Yourself.

I Am Made, Crudely, For Success.

How Can You Be So Many Women To So Many Strange People, Oh You Strange Girl?

I Am Terrified By This Dark Thing That Sleeps In Me; All Day I Feel Its Soft, Feathery Turnings, Its Malignity.

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'm Happier Writing About Doctors Than I Would Have Been Being One.

If You Expect Nothing From Anybody, You’re Never Disappointed.

I Have To Live My Life, And It Is The Only One I’ll Ever Have.

And I Identify Too Closely With My Reading, With My Writing.

I Am Still So Naïve; I Know Pretty Much What I Like And Dislike; But Please, Don’t Ask Me Who I Am. A Passionate, Fragmentary Girl, Maybe?

When I Fell Out Of The Light, I Entered The Stomach Of Indifference, The Wordless Cupboard.

I Shall Never Get Out Of This! There Are Two Of Me Now: This New Absolutely White Person And The Old Yellow One, And The White Person Is Certainly The Superior One. She Doesn't Need Food, She Is One Of The Real Saints. At The Beginning I Hated Her, She Had No Personality- She Lay In Bed With Me Like A Dead Body And I Was Scared, Because She Was Shaped Just The Way I Was Only Much Whiter And Unbreakable And With No Complaints. I Couldn't Sleep For A Week She Was So Cold.

God Has To Remind Us This Isn't Heaven By A Long Shot, So He Increases The Radios And Lethal Flies.

After All, We Are Nothing More Or Less Than We Choose To Reveal.

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.

I Have No Preconceptions. Whatever I See, I Swallow Immediately. Just As It Is, Unmisted By Love Or Dislike. I Am Not Cruel, Only Truthful.

And I Am Aware Of My Heart: It Opens And Closes Its Bowl Of Red Blooms Out Of Sheer Love Of Me.

... Stop Trying To Get Me To Write About 'decent Courageous People' -- Read The Ladies' Home Journal For Those! ... I Believe In Going Through And Facing The Worst, Not Hiding From It.

I Am Still Raw. I Say I May Be Back. You Know What Lies Are For. Even In Your Zen Heaven We Shan't Meet.

The Constant Struggle In Mature Life, I Think, Is To Accept The Necessity Of Tragedy And Conflict, And Not To Try To Escape To Some Falsely Simple Solution Which Does Not Include These More Somber Complexities.

I Love My Rejection Slips. They Show Me I Try.

I Wonder Why I Don't Go To Bed And Go To Sleep. But Then It Would Be Tomorrow, So I Decide That No Matter How Tired, No Matter How Incoherent I Am, I Can Skip On Hour More Of Sleep And Live.

There Is More Than One Good Way To Drown.

How Can I Tell Bob That My Happiness Streams From Having Wrenched A Piece Out Of My Life, A Piece Of Hurt And Beauty, And Transformed It To Typewritten Words On Paper? How Can He Know I Am Justifying My Life, My Keen Emotions, My Feeling, By Turning It Into Print?

No, I Won't Try To Escape Myself By Losing Myself In Artificial Chatter 'did You Have A Nice Vacation?' 'oh, Yes, And You?' I'll Stay Here And Try To Pin That Loneliness Down.

I Want So Obviously, So Desperately To Be Loved, And To Be Capable Of Love.

The Silence Between Us Was So Profound I Thought Part Of It Must Be My Fault.

The Floor Seemed Wonderfully Solid. It Was Comforting To Know I Had Fallen And Could Fall No Farther.

There Is No Life Higher Than The Grasstops

My Flesh Winced, In Cowardice, From Such A Death.

I Am Afraid Of Getting Older … I Am Afraid Of Getting Married. Spare Me From Cooking Three Meals A Day—spare Me From The Relentless Cage Of Routine And Rote. I Want To Be Free…. I Want, I Want To Think, To Be Omniscient…. I Think I Would Like To Call Myself ‘the Girl Who Wanted To Be God.

I Felt Like A Racehorse In A World Without Racetracks Or A Champion College Footballer Suddenly Confronted By Wall Street And A Business Suit, His Days Of Glory Shrunk To A Little Gold Cup On His Mantel With A Date Engraved On It Like The Date On A Tombstone.

I Shut My Eyes And All The World Drops Dead; I Lift My Eyes And All Is Born Again.

I Love People. Everybody. I Love Them, I Think, As A Stamp Collector Loves His Collection. Every Story, Every Incident, Every Bit Of Conversation Is Raw Material For Me.

Frustrated? Yes. Why? Because It Is Impossible For Me To Be God — Or The Universal Woman-and-man — Or Anything Much. I Am What I Feel And Think And Do. I Want To Express My Being As Fully As I Can Because I Somewhere Picked Up The Idea That I Could Justify My Being Alive That Way.

Winning Or Losing An Argument, Receiving An Acceptance Or Rejection, Is No Proof Of The Validity Or Value Of Personal Identity. One May Be Wrong, Mistaken, Or A Poor Craftsman, Or Just Ignorant - But This Is No Indication Of The True Worth Of One's Total Human Identity: Past, Present And Future!

My Wanting To Write Books Annihilates The Original Root Impulse That Would Have Me Bravely And Blunderingly Working On Them.

You Know What Lies Are For.

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.

So You Got Rid Of Your Astonishment That Someone Could Write So Much More Dynamically Than You. You Stopped Cherishing Your Aloneness And Poetic Differentness To Your Delicately Flat Little Bosom. You Said: She's To Good To Forget. How About Making Her A Friend And Competitor — You Could Learn Alot From Her. So You'll Try. So Maybe She'll Laugh In Your Face. So Maybe She'll Beat You Hollow In The End. So Anyhow, You'll Try, And Maybe, Possibly, She Can Stand You. Here's Hoping!

Everything People Did Seemed So Silly, Because They Only Died In The End.

I Want To Be Silverly Beautiful.

I Had Imagined A Kind, Ugly, Intuitive Man Looking Up And Say, 'ah!' In An Encouraging Way, As If He Could See Something I Couldn't, And Then I Would Find Words To Tell Him How I Was So Scared, As If I Were Being Stuffed Farther And Farther Into A Black, Airless Sack With No Way Out.

Compared With Me, A Tree Is Immortal.

This Is Newness: Every Little Tawdry Obstacle Glass-wrapped And Peculiar, Glinting And Clinking In A Saint's Falsetto. Only You Don't Know What To Make Of The Sudden Slippiness, The Blind, White, Awful, Inaccessible Slant. There's No Getting Up It By The Words You Know. No Getting Up By Elephant Or Wheel Or Shoe. We Have Only Come To Look. You Are Too New To Want The World In A Glass Hat.

God, It Was Good To Let Go, Let The Tight Mask Fall Off, And The Bewildered, Chaotic Fragments Pour Out. It Was The Purge, The Catharsis.

I Hurl My Heart To Halt His Pace.

From The Night Buddy Willard Kissed Me And Said I Must Go Out With A Lot Of Boys, He Made Me Feel I Was Much More Sexy And Experienced Than He Was And That Everything He Did Like Hugging And Kissing And Petting Was Simply What I Made Him Feel Like Doing Out Of The Blue, He Couldn’t Help It And Didn’t Know How It Came About. Now I Saw He Had Only Been Pretending All This Time To Be So Innocent.

Is To Throw Together Events From My Own Life, Fictionalizing To Add Color—it’s A Pot Boiler Really, But I Think It Will Show How Isolated A Person Feels When He Is Suffering A Breakdown . . . I’ve Tried To Picture My World And The People In It As Seen Through The Distorting Lens Of A Bell Jar.

The Sun Gives You Ulcers, The Wind Gives You T.b. Once You Were Beautiful.

People Or Stars Regard Me Sadly, I Disappoint Them.

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.

A Fierce Brief Fusion Which Dreamers Call Real, And Realists, An Illusion; An Insight Like The Flight Of Birds.

I Lay In That Tub On The Seventeenth Floor Of This Hotel For-women-only, High Up Over The Jazz And Push Of New York, For Near Unto An Hour, And I Felt Myself Growing Pure Again. 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’d Discovered, After A Lot Of Extreme Apprehension About What Spoons To Use, That If You Do Something Incorrect At Table With A Certain Arrogance, As If You Knew Perfectly Well You Were Doing It Properly, You Can Get Away With It And Nobody Will Think You Are Bad-mannered Or Poorly Brought Up. They Will Think You Are Original And Very Witty.

It Was Sometime In October; She Had Long Ago Lost Track Of All The Days And It Really Didn’t Matter Because One Was Like Another And There Were No Nights To Separate Them Because She Never Slept Any More.

Let's Face It: I'm Scared, Scared And Frozen. First, I Guess, I'm Afraid For Myself...the Old Primitive Urge For Survival. It's Getting So I Live Every Moment With Terrible Intensity.

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 Woke To The Sound Of Rain.

I Have Suffered The Atrocity Of Sunsets.

Oh, Something Is There, Waiting For Me. Perhaps Someday The Revelation Will Burst In Upon Me And I Will See The Other Side Of This Monumental Grotesque Joke. And Then I'll Laugh. And Then I'll Know What Life Is.

I Wanted Change And Excitement And To Shoot Off In All Directions Myself, Like The Colored Arrows From A Fourth Of July Rocket.

The Journey Over The Bridge Had Unnerved Me. The River Water Passed Me By Like An Untouched Drink. I Suspected That Even If My Mother And Brother Had Not Been There I Would Have Made No Move To Jump.

Winter Dawn Is The Color Of Metal, The Trees Stiffen Into Place Like Burnt Nerves.

I Always Was Interested In Prose. As A Teenager, I Published Short Stories. And I Always Wanted To Write The Long Short Story, I Wanted To Write A Novel. Now That I Have Attained, Shall I Say, A Respectable Age, And Have Had Experiences, I Feel Much More Interested In Prose, In The Novel. I Feel That In A Novel, For Example, You Can Get In Toothbrushes And All The Paraphernalia That One Finds In Dally Life, And I Find This More Difficult In Poetry.

Nothing Is Real Except The Present, And Already, I Feel The Weight Of Centuries Smothering Me. Some Girl A Hundred Years Ago Once Lived As I Do. And She Is Dead. I Am The Present, But I Know I, Too, Will Pass. The High Moment, The Burning Flash, Come And Are Gone, Continuous Quicksand. And I Don’t Want To Die.

So Much Working, Reading, Thinking, Living To Do. A Lifetime Is Not Long Enough. Nor Youth To Old Age Long Enough. Immortality And Permanence Be Damned. Sure I Want Them, But They Are Nonexistent, And Won't Matter When I Rot Underground. All I Want To Say Is: I Made The Best Of A Mediocre Job. It Was A Good Fight While It Lasted. And So Life Goes.

I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head.

And I A Smiling Woman. I Am Only Thirty. And Like The Cat I Have Nine Times To Die.

Dancing Is The Normal Prelude To Intercourse.

I Have Done, This Year, What I Said I Would: Overcome My Fear Of Facing A Blank Page Day After Day, Acknowledging Myself, In My Deepest Emotions, A Writer, Come What May.

The Night Sky Is Only A Sort Of Carbon Paper, Blueblack, With The Much-poked Periods Of Stars Letting In The Light, Peephole After Peephole--- A Bonewhite Light, Like Death, Behind All Things.

I Knew You'd Decide To Be All Right Again.

I Never Feel So Much Myself As When I'm In A Hot Bath.

I Wanted To Be Where Nobody I Knew Could Ever Come.

My Best Friends When I Was Young Were Always Doctors. I Used To Dress Up In A White Gauze Helmet And Go Round And See Babies Born And Cadavers Cut Open. This Fascinated Me, But I Could Never Bring Myself To Disciplining Myself To The Point Where I Could Learn All The Details That One Has To Learn To Be A Good Doctor. This Is The Sort Of Opposition: Somebody Who Deals Directly With Human Experiences, Is Able To Cure, To Mend, To Help, This Sort Of Thing.

It Is So Much Safer Not To Feel, Not To Let The World Touch Me.

I Think I Am Mad Sometimes.

If Only A Group Of People Were More Important To Me Than The Idea Of A Novel, I Might Begin A Novel.

I Want To Become Acutely Aware Of All I've Taken For Granted.

That Is Salvation. To Give Of Love Inside. To Keep Love Of Life, No Matter What, And Give To Others. Generously.

Yes, My Consuming Desire Is To Mingle With Road Crews, Sailors And Soldiers, Barroom Regulars - To Be A Part Of A Scene, Anonymous, Listening, Recording - All This Is Spoiled By The Fact That I Am A Girl, A Female Always Supposedly In Danger Of Assault And Battery. My Consuming Interest In Men And Their Lives Is Often Misconstrued As A Desire To Seduce Them, Or As An Invitation To Intimacy. Yes, God, I Want To Talk To Everybody As Deeply As I Can. I Want To Be Able To Sleep In An Open Field, To Travel West, To Walk Freely At Night.

I Felt Very Still And Empty, The Way The Eye Of A Tornado Must Feel, Moving Dully Along In The Middle Of The Surrounding Hullabaloo.

I Felt Dull And Flat And Full Of Shattered Visions.

Bright Beads Of Red Are Rising Through The Ink, Hearts-blood Bubbles Smearing Out Into The Black Stream

It Is Best To Meet In A Cul-de-sac, A Palace Of Velvet With Windows Of Mirrors. There One Is Safe, There Are No Family Photographs, No Rings Through The Nose, No Cries.

Can A Selfish Egocentric Jealous And Unimaginative Female Write A Damn Thing Worthwhile?

Cold Glass, How You Insert Yourself Between Myself And Myself. I Scratch Like A Cat. The Blood That Runs Is Dark Fruit- An Effect, A Cosmetic. You Smile. No, It Is Not Fatal.

I Don’t Care About Anyone, And The Feeling Is Quite Obviously Mutual.

I Laid My Face To The Smooth Face Of The Marble And Howled My Loss Into The Cold Salt Rain.

If Neurotic Is Wanting Two Mutually Exclusive Things At One And The Same Time, Then I'm Neurotic As Hell.

What Do You Have In Mind After You Graduate?" What I Always Thought I Had In Mind Was Getting Some Big Scholarship To Graduate School Or A Grant To Study All Over Europe, And Then I Thought I'd Be A Professor And Write Books Of Poems Or Write Books Of Poems And Be An Editor Of Some Sort. Usually I Had These Plans On The Tip Of My Tongue. "i Don't Really Know," I Heard Myself Say. I Felt A Deep Shock, Hearing Myself Say That, Because The Minute I Said It, I Knew It Was True.

But I Wasn't Sure. I Wasn't Sure At All. How Did I Know That Someday―at College, In Europe, Somewhere, Anywhere―the Bell Jar, With Its Stifling Distortions, Wouldn't Descend Again?

Oh What A Poet I Will Flay Myself Into.

The Worst Enemy To Creativity Is Self-doubt.

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.

As A Poet, One Lives A Bit On Air. I Always Like Someone Who Can Teach Me Something Practical.

I Can't Be Satisfied With The Colossal Job Of Merely Living.

The First Time I Saw A Fingerbowl Was At The Home Of My Benefactress. [...] The Water Had A Few Cherry Blossoms In It, And I Thought It Must Be Some Clear Sort Of Japanese After-dinner Soup And Ate Every Bit Of It, Including The Crisp Little Blossoms.

I Want To Write Because I Have The Urge To Excel In One Medium Of Translation And Expression Of Life. I Can't Be Satisfied With The Colossal Job Of Merely Living. Oh, No, I Must Order Life In Sonnets And Sestinas And Provide A Verbal Reflector For My 60-watt Lighted Head.

I Have Been Holding A Dialogue With Myself And Girding Myself To Stand Fast Without Running.

Ironically, Henry James' Biography Comforts Me & I Long To Make Known To Him His Posthumous Reputation He Wrote, In Pain, Gave All His Life (which Is More Than I Could Think Of Doing I Have Ted, Will Have Children But Few Friends) & The Critics Insulted & Mocked Him, Readers Didn't Read Him.

I Talk To God But The Sky Is Empty.

But They Know. They All Know. And What Am I Against So Many…?

Winter Is For Women The Woman Still At Her Knitting, At The Cradle Of Spanish Walnut, Her Body A Bulb In The Cold And Too Dumb To Think.

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.

…i Hate Myself For Not Being Able To Go Downstairs Naturally And Seek Comfort In Numbers. I Hate Myself For Having To Sit Here And Be Torn Between I Know Not What Within Me.

I Am Silver And Exact.i Have No Preconceptions.

I Have The Choice Of Being Constantly Active And Happy Or Introspectively Passive And Sad. Or I Can Go Mad By Ricocheting In Between.

I Didn’t Want Any Flowers, I Only Wanted To Lie With My Hands Turned Up And Be Utterly Empty. How Free It Is, You Have No Idea How Free—— The Peacefulness Is So Big It Dazes You, And It Asks Nothing, A Name Tag, A Few Trinkets. It Is What The Dead Close On, Finally; I Imagine Them Shutting Their Mouths On It, Like A Communion Tablet.

The Moon, Too, Abases Her Subjects, But In The Daytime She Is Ridiculous. Your Dissatisfactions, On The Other Hand, Arrive Through The Mailslot With Loving Regularity, White And Blank, Expansive As Carbon Monoxide. No Day Is Safe From News Of You, Walking About In Africa Maybe, But Thinking Of Me.

I Thought If Only I Had A Keen, Shapely Bone Structure To My Face Or Could Discuss Politics Shrewdly Or Was A Famous Writer Constantin Might Find Me Interesting Enough To Sleep With. 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, The Way I Did With Buddy Willard And The Boys Before Him.

Only I Wasn't Steering Anything, Not Even Myself.

The Blood Jet Is Poetry And There Is No Stopping It.

What I Hate Is The Thought Of Being Under A Man's Thumb," I Had Told Doctor Nolan. "a Man Doesn't Have A Worry In The World, While I've Got A Baby Hanging Over My Head Like A Big Stick, To Keep Me In Line.

The Box Is Only Temporary.

Aloneness And Selfness Are Too Important To Betray For Company.

I Am Inhabited By A Cry. Nightly It Flaps Out Looking, With Its Hooks, For Something To Love.

I Feel, Am Mad As Any Writer Must In One Way Be; Why Not Make It Real? I Am Too Close To The Bourgeois Society Of Suburbia: Too Close To People I Know I Must Sever My Self From Them, Or Be A Part Of Their World: This Half And Half Compromise Is Intolerable.

The One Thing I Was Good At Was Winning Scholarships And Prizes, And That Era Was Coming To An End.

I Think That In Poetry Personal Experience Is Very Important, But Certainly It Shouldn't Be A Kind Of Shut-box And Mirror Looking, Narcissistic Experience. I Believe It Should Be Relevant, And Relevant To The Larger Things, The Bigger Things Such As Hiroshima And Dachau And So On.

I, Love, I Am The Pure Acetylene Virgin Attended By Roses.

I Would Say Everything Should Be Able To Come Into A Poem, But I Can't Put Toothbrushes Into A Poem, I Really Can't!

I Said: I Must Remember This, Being Small.

Not Easy To State The Change You Made. If I'm Alive Now, I Was Dead, Though, Like A Stone, Unbothered By It.

Sometimes I Feel So Stupid And Dull And Uncreative That I Am Amazed When People Tell Me Differently.

If Doctor Nolan Asked Me For The Matches, I Would Say That I'd Thought They Were Made Of Candy And Had Eaten Them.

What Horrifies Me Most Is The Idea Of Being Useless: Well-educated, Brilliantly Promising, And Fading Out Into An Indifferent Middle Age.

I Desire The Things That Will Destroy Me In The End.

It Never Occurred To Me To Say No.

But Everybody Has Exactly The Same Smiling Frightened Face, With The Look That Says: "i'm Important. If You Only Get To Know Me, You Will See How Important I Am. Look Into My Eyes. Kiss Me, And You Will See How Important I Am.

God, Is This All It Is, The Ricocheting Down The Corridor Of Laughter And Tears? Of Self-worship And Self-loathing? Of Glory And Disgust?

I Saw The Days Of The Year Stretching Ahead Like A Series Of Bright, White Boxes, And Separating One Box From Another Was Sleep, Like A Black Shade. Only For Me, The Long Perspective Of Shades That Set Off One Box From The Next Day Had Suddenly Snapped Up, And I Could See Day After Day After Day Glaring Ahead Of Me Like A White, Broad, Infinitely Desolate Avenue.

You've Only Got So Long To Live.

Last Year A Friend Went Dark In A Nervous City Alone, The Sea Flashing Against His Glasses, The Sea Sorted Out At Last In His Inner Ear So He Could Leave This World As He'd Entered It Through The Undependable Irrational Influence Of Water. -kevin Jeffery Clark It Was As If What I Wanted To Kill Wasn't In That Skin Or The Thin Blue Pulse That Jumped Under My Thumb, But Somewhere Else, Deeper, More Secret, And A Whole Lot Harder To Get At.

The Silence Depressed Me. It Wasn't The Silence Of Silence. It Was My Own Silence.

The Moon Is No Door. It Is A Face In Its Own Right, White As A Knuckle And Terribly Upset. It Drags The Sea After It Like A Dark Crime; It Is Quiet With The O-gape Of Complete Despair. I Live Here.

August Rain: The Best Of The Summer Gone, And The New Fall Not Yet Born. The Odd Uneven Time.

I Lean To You, Numb As A Fossil. Tell Me I'm Here.

I Need The Reality Of Other People, Work, To Fulfill Myself. Must Never Become A Mere Mother And Housewife.

Secretly, In Studies And Attics And Schoolrooms All Over America, People Must Be Writing.

I Am Afraid. I Am Not Solid, But Hollow. I Feel Behind My Eyes A Numb, Paralyzed Cavern, A Pit Of Hell, A Mimicking Nothingness.

Perhaps When We Find Ourselves Wanting Everything, It Is Because We Are Dangerously Close To Wanting Nothing.

I Have The One Person I Could Ever Love In This World. Now I Must Work To Be A Person Worthy Of That.

I'm Doped And Thick From My Last Sleeping Pill.

Opinions Are Like Orgasms...mine Matters Most And I Really Don't Care If You Have One.

I Do Not Know Who I Am Tonight.

We Must Be Moving, Working, Making Dreams To Run Toward; The Poverty Of Life Without Dreams Is Too Horrible To Imagine.

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.

Tonight I Am Ugly. I Have Lost All Faith In My Ability To Attract Males, And In The Female Animal That Is A Rather Pathetic Malady . . . I Don't Care About Anyone, And The Feeling Is Quite Obviously Mutual. What Is It That Makes One Attract Others?

What Is My Life For And What Am I Going To Do With It? I Don't Know And I'm Afraid.

I Keep Wanting To Crawl Back Into The Womb.

And There's The Fallacy Of Existence: The Idea That One Could Be Happy Forever And Age With A Given Situation Or Series Of Accomplishments.

I Am Too Pure For You Or Anyone.

I Want To Taste And Glory In Each Day, And Never Be Afraid To Experience Pain; And Never Shut Myself Up In A Numb Core Of Nonfeeling, Or Stop Questioning And Criticizing Life And Take The Easy Way Out. To Learn And Think: To Think And Live; To Live And Learn: This Always, With New Insight, New Understanding, And New Love.

Widow. The Word Consumes Itself.

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.

This Seemed A Dreary And Wasted Life For A Girl With Fifteen Years Of Straight A's, But I Knew That's What Marriage Was Like, Because Cook And Clean And Wash Was Just What Buddy Willard's Mother Did From Morning Till Night, And She Was The Wife Of A University Professor And Had Been A Private School Teacher Herself.

We Should Meet In Another Life, We Should Meet In Air, Me And You.

For The Few Little Successes I May Seem To Have, There Are Acres Of Misgivings And Self-doubt.

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.

And I, Love, Am A Pathological Liar.

Pathological Liar

I May Never Be Happy, But Tonight I Am Content. At Times Like This I'd Call Myself A Fool To Ask For More.

You Cannot Regard Your Own Life With Objective Curiosity All The Time.

I Didn’t Want Any Flowers, I Only Wanted To Lie With My Hands Turned Up And Be Utterly Empty. How Free It Is, You Have No Idea How Free.

Please Let Him Come, And Give Me The Resilience & Guts To Make Him Respect Me, Be Interested, And Not To Throw Myself At Him With Loudness Or Hysterical Yelling; Calmly, Gently, Easy Baby Easy. He Is Probably Strutting The Backs Among Crocuses Now With Seven Scandinavian Mistresses. And I Sit, Spiderlike, Waiting, Here, Home; Penelope Weaving Webs Of Webster, Turning Spindles Of Tourneur. Oh, He Is Here; My Black Marauder; Oh Hungry Hungry. I Am So Hungry For A Big Smashing Creative Burgeoning Burdened Love: I Am Here; I Wait; And He Plays On The Banks Of The River Cam Like A Casual Faun.

I Think If I Had Done Anything Else I Would Like To Have Been A Doctor. This Is The Sort Of Polar Opposition To Being A Writer, I Suppose.

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.

If There's Anything I Look Down On, It's A Man In A Blue Outfit.

Let Me Not Be Weak And Tell Others How Bleeding I Am Internally; How Day By Day It Drips, And Gathers, And Congeals.

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.

I Saw Myself Sitting In The Crotch Of This Fig Tree, Starving To Death, Just Because I Couldn't Make Up My Mind Which Of The Figs I Would Choose. I Wanted Each And Every One Of Them, But Choosing One Meant Loosing All The Rest, And, As I Sat There, Unable To Decide, The Figs Began To Wrinkle And Go Black, And, One By One, They Plopped To The Ground At My Feet.

At Twenty I Tried To Die And Get Back, Back, Back To You. I Thought Even The Bones Would Do.

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.

Some Things Are Hard To Write About. After Something Happens To You, You Go To Write It Down, And Either You Over Dramatize It, Or Underplay It, Exaggerate The Wrong Parts Or Ignore The Important Ones. At Any Rate, You Never Write It Quite The Way You Want To.

I Drink Sherry And Wine By Myself Because I Like It And I Get The Sensuous Feeling Of Indulgence...luxury, Bliss, Erotic-tinged.

Although, I Admit, I Desire, Occasionally, Some Backtalk From The Mute Sky, I Can't Honestly Complain: A Certain Minor Light May Still Lean Incandescent Out Of Kitchen Table Or Chair As If A Celestial Burning Took Possession Of The Most Obtuse Objects Now And Then --

I Felt Wise And Cynical As All Hell.

You Have To Be Able To Make A Real Creative Life For Yourself, Before You Can Expect Anyone Else To Provide One Ready-made For You.

I Had Hoped, At My Departure, I Would Feel Sure And Knowledgeable About Everything That Lay Ahead -- After All, I Had Been "analyzed." Instead, All I Could See Were Question Marks.

I Like People, But To Learn About One Individual Always Appeals To Me More Than Anything.

I Want, I Think, To Be Omniscient. I Think I Would Like To Call Myself "the Girl Who Wanted To Be God." Yet If I Were Not In This Body Where Would I Be-perhaps I Am Destined To Be Classified And Qualified. But, Oh, I Cry Out Against It.

And What Is Happy? It Is A Going Always On. There Is Something Better To Be Done Than I Have Done, And Spurred By The Fair Delusion Of Progress, I Will Seek To Progress, To Whip Myself On, To More And More- To Learning. Always.

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 Am Myself. That Is Not Enough.

As A Poet I Would Say Everything Should Be Able To Come Into A Poem But I Can't Put Toothbrushes In A Poem. I Really Can't.

The Artist's Life Nourishes Itself On The Particular, The Concrete.

It Is As If My Life Were Magically Run By Two Electric Currents: Joyous Positive And Despairing Negative--which Ever Is Running At The Moment Dominates My Life, Floods It.

I Collect Men With Interesting Names.

I Am I-i Am Powerful, But To What Extent? I Am I.

I Think The Whole Emphasis In England, In Universities, On Practical Criticism (but Not That So Much As On Historical Criticism, Knowing What Period A Line Comes From) This Is Almost Paralysing. In America, In University, We Read - What? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, That Is Where We Began. Shakespeare Flaunted In The Background. I'm Not Sure I Agree With This, But I Think That' For The Young Poet, The Writing Poet, It Is Not Quite So Frightening To Go To University In America As It Is In England, For These Reasons.

The Tulips Are Too Red...they Hurt Me.

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.

I Hate Technicolor. Everybody In A Technicolor Movie Seems To Feel Obliged To Wear A Lurid Costume In Each New Scene And To Stand Around Like A Clotheshorse With A Lot Of Very Green Trees Or Very Yellow Wheat Or Very Blue Ocean Rolling Away For Miles And Miles In Every Direction.

It Was My First Big Chance, But Here I Was, Sitting Back And Letting It Run Through My Fingers Like So Much Water.

It Is A Feeling That No Matter What The Ideas Or Conduct Of Others, There Is A Unique Rightness And Beauty To Life Which Can Be Shared In Openness, In Wind And Sunlight, With A Fellow Human Being Who Believes In The Same Basic Principles.

Hurl Yourself At Goals Above Your Head And Bear The Lacerations That Come When You Slip And Make A Fool Of Yourself. Try Always, As Long As You Have Breath In Your Body, To Take The Hard Way–and Work, Work, Work To Build Yourself Into A Rich, Continually Evolving Entity.

I Feel Terribly Vulnerable And 'not-myself' When I'm Not Writing.

I Am So Hungry For A Big Smashing Creative Burgeoning Burdened Love.

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Dorothy Dunnett

Mark Z. Danielewski

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