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" A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin. "

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" My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me. "

" Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both. "

" There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. "

" There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it. "

" I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear - red and orange and green banners, 'Ban the Bomb!' etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan, dusty marchers, knapsacks on their backs - Quakers and Catholics, Africans and whites, Algerians and French - 40 percent were London housewives. "

" There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears. "

" Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. "

" I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. "

" But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion. "

" I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew. "

" Now and then, when I grow nostalgic about my ocean childhood - the wauling of gulls and the smell of salt, somebody solicitous will bundle me into a car and drive me to the nearest briny horizon. "

" That is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died; we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete: a fine, white, flying myth. "

" Freedom is not of use to those who do not know how to employ it. "

" I don't believe that the meek will inherit the earth; The meek get ignored and trampled. "

" A baby! I hated babies. I, who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe, felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander, a museum mammoth. "

" How we need another soul to cling to. "

" In London the day after Christmas (Boxing Day), it began to snow: my first snow in England. For five years, I had been tactfully asking, 'Do you ever have snow at all?' as I steeled myself to the six months of wet, tepid gray that make up an English winter. 'Ooo, I do remember snow,' was the usual reply, 'when I were a lad.' "

" Kiss me and you will see how important I am. "

" Wear your heart on your skin in this life. "

" The next five months are grim ones. I always feel sorry to have the summertime change, with the dark evenings closing in mid-afternoon, and will try to lay in some physical comforts these months - the best insurance against gloominess for me. "

" I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. "

" What I want back is what I was. "

" I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have. "

" Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.' "

" Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury. "

" I am a victim of introspection. "

" I made a point of eating so fast I never kept the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce. Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce. "

" My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land - the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. "

" I want Books and Babies and Beef stews. "

" I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things, such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on. "