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....

I cry at everything. Simply to spite myself and embarrass myself.

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.

Why do my beheld beauties vanish and deform themselves as soon as I look twice.

Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what was this fall, and what I never want to be again. The pouting...

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.

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...

I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him

Already she feels jaded. Weary, and gladly tired and old.

All, all, becomes profitable. Education is of the most satisfying and available nature. I am at Smith! Which two years ago was a doubtful dream - and that fortuitous change of dream to reality has led...

if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should...

Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love...

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

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.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how...

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And...

We all like to think that we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

I am disabused of all faith, and see too clearly.

I get into a rut, unable to yank my mind out of it.

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

I don't want to use higher education as an escape from responsibility, but I feel there is so much more awareness I should have before plunging onto the field of battle.

I need someone to pour myself into.

Feel like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying.

My skin is broken out from subconscious anxiety and tension, self-induced. Nothing is more difficult than lashing a vagrant mind suddenly into long self-imposed stints of concentration.

I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren't many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own. and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and...

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.

Masks are the order of the day - and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid.