The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Sure, I’m dramatic and sloppily semi-cynical and semi-sentimental. But, in leisure years I could grow and choose my way. Now I am living on the edge. We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness and not being quite able to make out, through the yellow, stinking mist, just what lies below in the slime, in the oozing, vomit-streaked slime; and so I could go on, my thoughts, writing much, trying to find the core, the meaning for myself.

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

In spite of everything, I still have my good old sense of humor.

A fierce brief fusion which dreamers call real, and realists, an illusion; an insight like the flight of birds.

It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.

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