One thing, I try to be honest. And what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering.

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.

I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.

I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.

I feel self-repressed again. The old fall disease. Where is my willpower? The idea of a life gets in the way of my life...I dream too much, work too little.

What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security,’ and, ‘What a man is is an arrow into the future and a what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is.