“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.”

“I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.”

“When I walk out, I am a great event. I do not have to think, or even rehearse.What happens in me will happen without attention.The pheasant stands on the hill;He is arranging his brown feathers.I cannot help smiling at what it is I know. Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.”

“How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?”

“I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.”

“I inhabit the wax image of myself, a doll's body. Sickness begins here; I am a dartboard for witches.”

“I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple ‘lucky stones’ I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath.”