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She can be rude, undependable, and she is more to me than all the pretty, well-to-do, artificial girls I could ever meet.
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.
Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll know what life is. –
“I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
You don’t know quite what it did to me. My mental fear, which can be at times forced into the background, reared up and caught me in the pit of my stomach; it became a physical nausea which wouldn’t let me eat breakfast.
Sylvia you would’ve loved lexapro 😔
The big men are all deaf; they don’t want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street in cleated boots.
I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those. –
If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier; if I didn’t have any sex organs, I wouldn’t waver on the brink of nervous emotion and tears all the time. –
After a while I suppose I’ll get used to the idea of marriage and children. If only it doesn’t swallow up my desires to express myself in a smug, sensuous haze. Sure, marriage is self expression, but if only my art, my writing, isn’t just a mere sublimation of my sexual desires which will run dry once I get married. 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? –
I will be a little god in my small way.
– I have alot to give someone, someday.
So this is what we have to learn to be part of a community: to respond blindly,
So I told him various lies about liking him, and he told me about his girl. From now on when a boy starts telling me about his lost loves I am going to run in the opposite direction screaming loudly.
Click-click. Clip-clip. Tick-tick. snip-snip. And it goes on and on. I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me – draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. 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 –
My head aches. There is history to read – – centuries to comprehend before I sleep, millions of lives to assimilate before breakfast tomorrow.
“Character is Fate.” If I had to hazard three words to sum up my philosophy of life, I’d choose those.
All I need to do is keep my judgment, sense of balance and philosophic sense of humor, and I’ll be fine, no matter what happens. If character is fate, I sure am adjusting mine under my lucky star – * * *
Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.
God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.
I’ve got to admire someone to really like them deeply – to value them as friends.
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want?
I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives.
The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.
Do vegetarians rot more rapidly than meat-eaters?
Sylvia and her grotesque humor lmao
Sounds like something out of a horror story. God save us from doing that again. For the United States did that. Our guilt. My country. No, never again. And then one reads in the papers “Second bomb blast in Nevada bigger than the first!” What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled “enemy?”
How could we control them under our “democratic” system, we, who even now are losing that precious commodity, freedom of speech?
This country has a lot, but we’re not always right and pure.
How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? – – – That I have banged into and assimilated various things?
Read widely of others experiences in thought and action – stretch to others even though it hurts and strains and would be more comfortable to snuggle back in the comforting cotton-wool of blissful ignorance! Hurl yourself at goals above your head and bear the lacerations that come when you slip and make a fool of yourself. Try always, as long as you have breath in your body, to take the hard way, the Spartan way – and work, work, work to build yourself into a rich, continually evolving entity!
Need this tattooed onto my forehead
What guy you would like, would see the depths in a girl outwardly like all the other physical american queenies? So why go places with guys you can’t talk to? You’ll never meet a soul that way – – – not the sort you want to meet. Better to stay in your garret reading than to go from one party to another. Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long. You’ve got to be able to talk.
Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.
Mental nausea of daily squash flabby cauliflower and grease dripping slick and sheepish onto the placid plate of mind.
Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.
I had been washed by the sea, cleansed, baptised, purified, and dried clean and crisp by the sun.
It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection.
But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man? Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.
“No, please, God, not another day beginning.”
God knows. Maybe he doesn’t. If he lives in my head or under my left ventricle, maybe he’s too uncomfortable to know much of anything.
I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.
Jesus
Victimized by sex is the human race.
No, rather, there will be two over-lapping circles, with a certain strong riveted center of common ground, but both with separate arcs jutting out in the world. A balanced tension; adaptible to circumstances, in which there is an elasticity of pull, tension, yet firm unity. Two stars, polarized:
So he accuses me of “struggling for dominance”? Sorry, wrong number. Sure, I’m a little scared of being dominated. (Who isn’t? Just the submissive, docile, milky type of individual. And that is Not he, Not me.) But that doesn’t mean I, ipso facto, want to dominate. No, it is not a black-and-white choice or alternative like: “Either-I’m-victorious on-top-or-you-are.” It is only balance that I ask for. Not the continual subordination of one persons desires and interests to the continual advancement of another’s! That would be too grossly unfair
It is she who takes over the responsibility of facing reality.
To look at her, you might not guess that inside she is laughing and crying, at her own stupidities and luckinesses, and at the strange enigmatic ways of the world which she will spend a lifetime trying to learn and understand.
The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever.
How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
😭😭
“I am a part of all that I have met.”
I have gone through a long period of awkward, self-conscious unpopularity. Although I could be called an extrovert now, there are still recurrent traces of my old inferiority complex.
He fed me orange juice, half a cold peach, and kisses.
Is this too much to ask for
So much working, reading, thinking, living to do. A lifetime is not long enough. Nor youth to old age long enough. Immortality and permanence be damned. Sure I want them, but they are nonexistent, and won’t matter when I rot underground.
