Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover… Read More →

The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. … Read More →

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from Read More →

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear Read More →

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, … Read More →

I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, a Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptized by its pure need. That’s what I was. […]  […] Is that too much to expect? That I would … Read More →

I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer … Read More →

We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live … Read More →

I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response […]  […] In time of … Read More →

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose Read More →

Mr Neville, noting the minute alteration in her attention to him, leaned over the table. ‘You are wrong to think that you cannot live without love, Edith.’ ‘No, I am not wrong,’ she said, slowly. ‘I … Read More →

Erik Satie never used to open the letters he received, but he always answered them. He would check the sender’s name and address and write a reply. After he died, his friends found all those unopened letters and some felt … Read More →

And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; … Read More →

Beautiful books are written in a sort of foreign language. Beneath each word each one of us puts his own meaning or at least his own image, which is often a misinterpretation. But in beautiful books all our misinterpretations are … Read More →

i am a restrained person. otherwise my heart would race past my tongue to pour out everything. instead i mumble, i gnaw myself. i lose hope. and my mind is burning. Read More →

What kind of happiness do you foresee for me? Paint me the picture of your happy Antigone. What are the unimportant little sins that I shall have to commit before I am allowed to sink my teeth into life and tear happiness from it! … Read More →

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating … Read More →

I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain, that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the … Read More →

Women learn to veil things. Who likes to look straight at real passion? Read More →

I could be healed by the sheer courage of continuing to live. i could heal myself. Read More →

May 27. A great deal of unhappiness in the last entry. Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily. […] April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of … Read More →

We aren’t now so badly situated to face up to the truth of these just sentences. There’s a good chance they will turn disastrous. Perhaps the condition of clairvoyance which they demonstrate was much less a gift of … Read More →

You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, … Read More →

I suffer from a chronic nausea—after i’m with people. The awareness (after-awareness) of how programmed I am, how insincere, how frightened. […]  […] My library is an archive of longings. Read More →

“Is that all? That is all. Is there no explanation of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel? Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death. – Farewell.” Read More →

Queer state of nerves. I could sleep all day & I dream all night. Sexual excitement, tears, depression. No work done. Nearly 28 & no work done. […]  […] Two months spent in hard living. Time to sum up … Read More →

Aubade by Louis Macneice […] Having bitten on life like a sharp apple Or, playing it like a fish, been happy, Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue What have we after that to look forward to? Not the twilight of the … Read More →

At this precise moment of the winter of 1967–68, she is probably not thinking of anything, absorbed in her enjoyment of their self-contained unit of three, which a telephone call or the doorbell would disrupt, and her temporary … Read More →

“It is the phenomenon somethings called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is … Read More →

Am I in love? –yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever … Read More →

I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little … Read More →

He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming … Read More →

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without singing them, was often a woman. […]  […] The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that … Read More →

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap … Read More →

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so … Read More →

What I told you about saving people isn’t true. You might think it is, because you might want someone else to save you, or you might want to save someone so badly. But no one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself. … Read More →

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and … Read More →

desire to be apart, sometimes, to understand who I am without the rest. And what I return to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self . . . is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a … Read More →

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. Read More →