“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.”

“Maybe if I could slip into Sylvia’s mind, sort out the spices in her rack, alphabetize them and dust them off. Maybe then I’d understand how it’s the little things that pull you under.”

“Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”

“He could not stand. It was notThat he could not thrive, he was bornWith everything but the will –That can be deformed, just like a limb.Death was more interesting to him.Life could not get his attention.”

“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.”

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”