Great Throughts Treasury

"I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more."

"I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege."

"I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened."

"I am not a saint or a cripple,"

"I am not my childhood,' Snowman says out loud."

"I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso. I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tin cans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions. I am the space you desecrate as you pass through."

"I am in a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except for the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor."

"I am yours. If you feed me garbage, I will sing a song of garbage. This is a hymn."

"I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman."

"I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault."

"I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it?s shameful or immodest but because I don?t want to see it. I don?t want to look at something that determines me so completely."

"I believe that everyone else my age is an adult whereas I am merely in disguise."

"I begin to see how the line is crossed, between histrionics and murder."

"I can tell you that once upon a time when I was doing public events people would ask me, "What do you think about the arts?, What do you think of the role of women?, What do you think of men?, What do you think of all of these things?", and now they ask one thing, and that one thing is this, "Is there hope?"."

"I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals."

"I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light."

"I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key words: love, alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose."

"I did not know how to paint or even what to paint, but I knew I had to begin."

"I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would someday be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know ? yet ? that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me ? yet ? the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me."

"I could see how you could do extreme things for the person you loved. Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn't know would be helped by it."

"I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not experience sexual pleasure this was all to the good, because then she would not be liable to wander off seeking it elsewhere."

"I didn't know I was about to be left with her idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like a badge and no chance to throw it back at her (as would have been the normal course of affairs with a mother and a daughter?if she'd lived, as I'd grown older)."

"I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again."

"I don't even glance at the herbal teas; I go straight for the real, vile coffee. Jitter in a cup. It cheers me up to know I'll soon be so tense."

"I do not say making love, because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for. There wasn't a lot of choice, but there was some, and this is what I chose."

"I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?"

"I don?t even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it?s an equal darkness. Or light."

"I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely."

"I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different."

"I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead."

"I exist in two places, here and where you are."

"I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I?d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red."

"I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point."

"I find the entrance to the women's washroom... There's a rest area, gently lit in pinkish tones, with several easy chairs and a sofa, in a lime-green bamboo-shoot print, with a wall clock above it in a gold filigree frame. Here they haven't removed the mirror, there's a long one opposite the sofa. You need to know, here, what you look like."

"I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them."

"I feel like the word shatter."

"I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag."

"I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read."

"I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else."

"I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre. Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you. I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid."

"I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red."

"I had now been a servant for three years, and could act the part well enough by that time. But Nancy was very changeable, two-faced you might call her, and it wasn't easy to tell what she wanted from one hour to the next. One minute she would be up on her high horse and ordering me about and finding fault, and the next minute she would be my best friend, or pretend to be, and would put her arm through mine, and say I looked tired, and should sit down with her, and have a cup of tea. It is much harder to work for such a person, as just when you are curtsying and Ma'am-ing them, they turn around and upbraid you for being so stiff and formal, and want to confide in you, and expect the same in return. You cannot ever do the correct thing with them."

"I have periods now, like normal girls; I too am among the knowing, I too can sit out volleyball games and go to the nurse's for aspirin and waddle along the halls with a pad like a flattened rabbit tail wadded between my legs, sopping with liver-colored blood."

"I have always known that there were spellbinding evil parts for women. For one thing, I was taken at an early age to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Never mind the Protestant work ethic of the dwarfs. Never mind the tedious housework-is-virtuous motif. Never mind the fact that Snow White is a vampire -- anyone who lies in a glass coffin without decaying and then comes to life again must be. The truth is that I was paralyzed by the scene in which the evil queen drinks the magic potion and changes her shape. What power, what untold possibilities!"

"I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife? as if I?m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That?s why I?m not allowed a knife."

"I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one 'race' - the human race - and that we are all members of it."

"I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had."

"I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it? By telling you anything at all I?m at least believing in you... Because I?m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are."

"I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of their mothers phoned mine to complain, though I think I was more upset than they were: they didn't believe me but I believed them."

"I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession with undertones of nausea."