The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

Everything people did seemed so silly, because they only died in the end.

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.