If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.
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.
Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.
Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences
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.
If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
Is there no way out of the mind?
I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.
I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.
I talk to God but the sky is empty.
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.
I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
How we need another soul to cling to.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
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 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?
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 have a call.
I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.
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.
Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.
What did my arms do before they held you?
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.
I was supposed to be having the time of my life.
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.
I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.
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." (Initiation)
I felt wise and cynical as all hell.
The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.
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.
There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
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.
I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.
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.
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.
Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962
I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.
I think I made you up inside my head.
If they substituted the word 'Lust' for 'Love' in the popular songs it would come nearer the truth.
How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.
The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.
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.
If you love her", I said, "you'll love somebody else someday.
What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love? From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.
Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
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.
What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.
Is anyone anywhere happy?
So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.
How can you be so many women to so many strange people, oh you strange girl?
I am too pure for you or anyone. From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962
What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. 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 am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of storeys, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.
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.
I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.
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.
I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am.
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.
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 has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.
It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.
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?
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.
The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.
The blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
I knew you'd decide to be all right again.
I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.
Character is fate.
You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.
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.
I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.
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?
I must learn more about these people―try to understand them, put myself in their place. No, instead I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is.
Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.
Wear your heart on your skin in this life.
I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.
I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
All I want is blackness. Blackness and silence.
