I’m like the child who buries her head in the pillow so as not to see, the child who tells herself that light causes sadness—

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

The master said you must write what you see / But what I see does not move me / The master answered Change what you see.

Intense love always leads to mourning.

I pretended indifference…even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond.

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.

It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

Developing leaders without a model is like building a house without a plan.

I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.

After 10 years of French torture - psychological torture - it's great to do an American movie.

I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is the Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.

Little hearts, little souls give little lusts big power. Big hearts give little lusts little power.

I am continually calming the restless scanning of my rational mind in order to perceive the finer energies that enable me to unitively merge with everything around me.

I bought a box of animal crackers, but there was nothing inside. They'd eaten each other.

I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs.