I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.

I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right…. Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

I held her wrists and then I got it through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong and graceless and sick. all the things I had learned had been wasted. there was no creature living as foul as I and all my poems were false.

Some nights I knew that if I slept I would die.

Sometimes a man doesn’t know what to do about things and sometimes it’s best to lie very still and try not to think at all about anything.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.