If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

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

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

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

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

Is there no way out of the mind?

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know. "Oh, sure you know," the photographer said. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

How we need another soul to cling to.

To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I am still so na ve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?

Dying is an art. Like everything else, I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call.

I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual.

I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

What did my arms do before they held you?

I wonder why I don't go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.

Because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street caf in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

I want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same.

So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them." (Initiation)

I felt wise and cynical as all hell.

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free.

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

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.

I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.

And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. From the poem "Years", 16 November 1962

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I'm here.

I think I made you up inside my head.