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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you overdramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.
I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.
Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.
If only I can find him … the man who will be intelligent, yet physically magnetic and personable. If I can offer that combination, why shouldn’t I expect it in a man?
My one link with Saturday night life is gone, and I have no one left. No one at all. I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others?
The reason that I haven’t been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven’t had one decent coherent thought to put down.
most American males worship woman as a sex machine with rounded breasts and a convenient opening in the vagina, as a painted doll who shouldn’t have a thought in her pretty head other than cooking a steak dinner and comforting him in bed after a hard 9-5 day at a routine business job.
my mother. Her pitiful wish is that I “be happy.”
I am in love with two brothers,g embarrassingly so. I will leave. Unless I am lucky, both may give way to marrying while I am gone, so I will come back to a big void. On the other hand, I may fall in love, have an affair with someone over “there.”
And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness. I want to eat my cake abroad and come home and find it securely on the doorstep if I still choose to accept it for the rest of my life.
You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died.
Once I break the connection with school life it’ll be hard getting back—
I feel I’ve cheated myself on languages: I haven’t really worked at learning it,
He is at a party now, I know; with some girl.
Be stoic when necessary and write—you have seen a lot, felt deeply, and your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful—WRITE.
Write, read, sun & swim. Oh, to live like this.
but I am, in my deep soul, happiest on the moors—my deepest soul-scape, in the hills by the Spanish Mediterranean,
Suddenly my life, which had always clearly defined immediate and long-range objectives—a Smith scholarship, a Smith degree, a won poetry or story contest, a Fulbright, a Europe trip, a lover, a husband—has or appears to have none.
I hated men because they didn’t have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain.
Why do I feel I should have a Ph.D., that I am aimless, brainless without one, when I know what is inside is the only credential necessary for my identity?
The discipline of a Ph.D. attracts me in my foolhardiness, or of reporting for weeklies, or of reviewing. I must use my brain in the world, not just at home on private things.
Stayed up till about 3 this morning, feeling again the top of my head would come off, it was so full, so full of knowledge.
What have you done, what have you done? When I take an equally cold look, I see that I have studied, thought, and somehow not done anything more than teach a year: my mind lies fallow.
