I have the one person I could ever love in this world. Now I must work to be a person worthy of that.

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.

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted.