"Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn."

"I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I."

"I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give."

"How we need that security! How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into"

"It is a nightmare. There is no sun. There is only continual motion. If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach."

"Let me not be desperate and throw away my honor for want of solace; let me not hide in drinking and lacerating myself on strange men; let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals. I am still young. Even twenty-three and a half is not to late to live anew. I honestly hope that in five years I can make a new life."

"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, the Spartan way— and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich continually evolving entity."

"God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of ‘parties’ with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering."

"Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh had gone through; I dream of what it may go through. I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception. And, I think: I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence."

"On, on, on. Through ages of empires, of decline and fall. Swift, ceaseless pace. Will I never rest in sunlight again - slow, languid and golden with peace?"

"You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again."

"I am not content, because my lot is limiting, as are all others. People specialize; people become devoted to an idea; people “find themselves.” But the very content that comes from finding yourself is over-shadowed by the knowledge that by doing so you are admitting you are not only a grotesque, but a special kind of grotesque."

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited."

"Then it hit me and I just blurted, I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them."

"... the night time is worst now. sleep is like the grave, wormeaten with dreams."

"I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a taj mahal in the future."

"Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?"

"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."

"It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain... 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."

"Yet I liked him too much – way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did."

"You felt no realitiy, no knife of sorrow cut your intestines to bits. Only a weariness, a longing for a shoulder to sleep on, a pair of arms to curl up in- and a lack of that now."

"And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don’t want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch: 'She was the sort of girl...' and in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can."

"Yes, I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those."

"And you are the moving epitome of all of this. Of you, by you, for you. 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?"

"To love, to be loved. By one; by humanity. I am afraid of love, of sacrifice on the altar. I am going to think, to grow, to sally forth, please, please, unafraid."

"Will we ever? I wonder. I wonder terribly."

"I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is willfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? - - - That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am?"

"I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can."

"I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children’s books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on “Snow” when I was eight. I said aloud, “I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I’m still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like.” And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years."

"The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain."

"Something in me wants more. I can’t rest."

"I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."

"To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckiness, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend lifetime trying to learn and understand."

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

"What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age."

"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."

"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."