You live out the confusions until they become clear.

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.

America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.

At first I protested and rebelled against poetry. I was about to deny my poetic worlds. I was doing violence to my illusions with analysis, science, and learning Henry’s language, entering Henry’s world. I wanted to destroy by violence and animalism my tenuous fantasies and illusions and my hypersensitivity. A kind of suicide. The ignominy awakened me. Then June came and answered the cravings of my imagination and saved me. Or perhaps she killed me, for now I am started on a course of madness.

The self is merely the lens through which we see others and the world.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

He was jealous of her future, and she of his past.