The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life.

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

Widow. The word consumes itself.