Quotes About Struggle

She reminded Kevin again that she had forced herself to turn and walk away from him when everything in her wanted to stay.

Though they washed her with wineand rubbed her with butterit was to no avail.She lay as still as a gold piece.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.

Meanwhile in my head, I'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.

That's what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn't worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

And tonight our skin, our bones, that have survived our fathers, will meet, delicate in the hold, fastened together in an intricate lock. Then one of us will shout, "My need is more desperate!" and I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out.

Suicides have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.

Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.

And if I tried to give you something else, something outside myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope

If you have endured a great despair, then, you did it alone.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon of pain, that it drops downward to the past where it mixes with last year's cupful and downward into a decade's quart and downward into a lifetime's ocean. I alternate treading water and deadman's float.

God went out of me as if the sea dried up like sandpaper, as if the sun became a latrine. God went out of my fingers. They became stone. My body became a side of mutton and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.

I planned to suffer and I cannot.

I'd won the world but like a forsaken explorer, I'd lost my map.

I'm in pain because the day is ending and somehow I am never healing.

Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am. Daddy? That's another kind of prison. It's not the prince at all, but my father drunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish. What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help - this life after death?

A good mixture of nothing and everything is eating up my head alive.

It is snowing and death bugs me as stubborn as insomnia.

The trouble is that I am crazy and the room, ah, my own room drinks me.

From "Her Kind" I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.

Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

It was also my violent heart that broke.