Sometimes snakes can’t slough. They can’t burst their old skin. Then they go sick and die inside the old skin, and nobody ever sees the new pattern. It needs a real desperate recklessness to burst your old skin at last. You simply don’t care what happens to you, if you rip yourself in two, so long as you do get out.

The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.

Go deeper than love, for the soul has greater depths, love is like the grass, but the heart is deep wild rock molten, yet dense and permanent. Go down to your deep old heart, and lose sight of yourself. And lose sight of me, the me whom you turbulently loved. Let us lose sight of ourselves, and break the mirrors. For the fierce curve of our lives is moving again to the depths out of sight, in the deep living heart.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.

The pyramids of Egypt will not last a moment compared to the daisy.