I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we ... believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

The shell is America's most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early.

I don't tell the truth any more to those who can't make use of it. I tell it mostly to myself, because it always changes me.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.