Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move, my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that? Through the birches, I could see the pond. The sun was cutting small white holes in the water. I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself, like a girl after her first lover turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign. But nakedness in women is always a pose. I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

Like a child, the earth's going to sleep, or so the story goes. But I'm not tired, it says. And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired

At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.

The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.

The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.

I pretended indifference…even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.