“Perhaps you considered yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.Thirty years now I have laboredTo dredge the silt from your throat.I am none the wiser.”

“I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. (...) I want, I think, to be omniscient… I think I would like to call myself "The girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be—perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful—but to what extent? I am I.”

“I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love. . . . . I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.”

“I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.”

“Not easy to state the change you made.If I'm alive now, I was dead,Though, like a stone, unbothered by it.”

“From now on when a boy starts telling me about his lost loves I am going to run in the opposite direction screaming loudly... Somehow I bring out such confidences, and I'm pretty sick of hearing about Bobbe or Dorothy or P.K. or Liota. God damn them all.”

“Now I am silent, hateUp to my neck,Thick, thick.I do not speak.--from "Lesbos", written 18 October 1962”