“When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.”

“Anne, I don't want to live. . . . Now listen, life is lovely, but I Can't Live It. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds . . . but if you knew how it Felt. To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live it. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives . . . locked outside of all that's real. . . . Anne, do you know of such things, can you hear???? I wish, or think I wish, that I were dying of something for then I could be brave, but to be not dying, and yet . . . and yet to [be] behind a wall, watching everyone fit in where I can't, to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong . . . believe me, (can you?) . . . what's wrong. I want to belong. I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.”

“Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women" Perhaps I was born kneeling, born coughing on the long winter, born expecting the kiss of mercy, born with a passion for quicknessand yet, as things progressed, I learned early about the stockadeor taken out, the fume of the enema.By two or three I learned not to kneel, not to expect, to plant my fires undergroundwhere none but the dolls, perfect and awful, could be whispered to or laid down to die.Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was—a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.Do I not look in the mirror, these days, and see a drunken rat avert her eyes? Do I not feel the hunger so acutelythat I would rather die than lookinto its face? I kneel once more, in case mercy should comein the nick of time.”

“Fee-fi-fo-fum -Now I'm borrowed.Now I'm numb.”

“Depression is boring, I thinkand I would do better to makesome soup and light up the cave.”

“Don’t worry if they say you’re crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It’s a good thing to know - no matter what they call it.”

“Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly.”