I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.

I feel sorry for the man who marries you... because everyone thinks you're sweet and you're not.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked.

It bothers me that I won't live to see the end of the century, because, when I was young, in St. Louis, I remember saying to Marilyn, my sister by adoption, that that was how long I wanted to live: seventy years.

I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calk, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. ... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.

It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself.