We know a thing by its opposite corollary; hot by having experienced cold; good by having decided what is bad; love by hate.

The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big card of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

I want to kill myself, to escape from responsiblity, to crawl abjectly back into the womb.