“…* to learn that money makes life smooth in some ways, and to feel how tight and threadbare life is if you have too little. * to despise money, which is a farce, mere paper, and to hate what you have to do for it, and yet to long to have it in order to be free from slaving for it. * to yearn toward art, music, ballet and good books, and get them only in tantalizing snatches.”

“I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.”

“Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that — I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much — so very much to learn.”

“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 cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.”

“This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.”

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wantedTo lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.How free it is, you have no idea how free——The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.--from "Tulips", written 18 March 1961”