When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

We sit on the kitchen exchanging these diabolical outgrowths of overfertile minds.

The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.

When she closed her eyes she felt he had many hands, which touched her everywhere, and many mouths, which passed so swiftly over her, and with a wolflike sharpness, his teeth sank into her fleshiest parts. Naked now, he lay his full length over her. She enjoyed his weight on her, enjoyed being crushed under his body. She wanted him soldered to her, from mouth to feet. Shivers passed through her body.

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!