To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accepts their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in the state are those who have the most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have the most say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke. We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It blew all the cobwebs away.

The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.