...she could not stick by the golden mean...was always anxious to experiment in extremes...to find out what was enough by indulging herself in too much." (Gordon Lameyer)

Sylvia had begun her month in New York with princessy pomp and fanfare….Her departure on June 27 was entirely different. She left New York shaken, depleted, and utterly alone.

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

These were the new girls of New York- complete with rapid heartbeats from too much nicotine and coffee. They were nervous and fluttery but completely alluring- the new face of urban femininity.

Judgement is so often a thwarted, frustrated expression of envy.

New York is unruly, tangled. The city woos first, then mangles, then pastes back together in a fresh, dazzling mosaic.

Someone who smiles too much with you can sometime frown too much with you at your back.

I felt I should have been taught about the landmine problem. It made me suddenly realize certain things about the world and how much I had to learn, like the history of the people.

Every time I fail to smoke a cigarette between innings, the opposition will score.

I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time.

I have done interviews in the past, and they cut everything out except for the outrageous line, and then they take it out of context.

With all these great (guitar teachers) around here, don't cop their licks, COP THEIR ATTITUDE.

Silence and reserve suggest latent power. What some men think has more effect than what others say.

Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance.

physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.