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on the lam,”
I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it.
It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.
I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror. Only this time, I couldn’t think of anything to write. So I just wrote my own name, over and over again.
was experiencing that terrifying thing of suddenly seeing someone you know terribly well as if for the first time.
Looking back, I didn’t know anyone he’d actually been wrong about—except of course me, but then as we know I am totally incomprehensible to everyone including myself.
That’s my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.
This isn’t just idle curiosity. It’s difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really have lived; that I never really will live—exist or whatever—in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy.
I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.
Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?
One of the few things that had impressed me in college was a Southern girl’s account of how she avoided being kissed on the doorstep of her house once by wearing a flower in her hair and sticking it in her mouth when she said good night.
To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit.
I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.
Later on somebody told me that there isn’t a girl in the whole world who won’t take off her clothes if she’s convinced she’s doing it for aesthetic reasons, but at the time it seemed to me I had taken one more giant step.
It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.
“Oh Jim,” I murmured softly into it, “you poor, poor fool. It’s just your luck to get mixed up with a heartless bitch like me.”
For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick.
Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.
What happens when your curiosity just suddenly gives out? When the will and the energy snap and it all seems so once-over-again? What’s going to happen to me five years from now, when I wake in the night (or can’t sleep in the first place, like now), take a deep breath to start all over again, and find that I’ve no breath left?
No matter what you do you’ve got to try to do it well. Otherwise it’s unbearable.
The worst of it was that part of me was still in love with him. Part of me refused to die; still hoped there was some simple, uncomplicated explanation that would clear up everything,
What was the use of remembering? If it was unpleasant, it was unpleasant. If it was pleasant, it was over.
“The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”
Ernest Hemingway said to me, “I liked your book. I liked the way your characters all speakdifferently.” And then added, “My characters all sound the same because I never listen.”
