It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual.

It was sometime in October; she had long ago lost track of all the days and it really didn’t matter because one was like another and there were no nights to separate them because she never slept any more.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.

I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.

O heart, such disorganization!

A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape