Quotes About Struggle

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are.

As they say in the movies, I got here the hard way, with no education and no dough, and whatever I am I am because I wrote it.

I am ugly, submerged in my own past and my own madness

You fell, she said, just remember you fell. I fell, is all he told the doctors in the big hospital. A nice lady came and asked him questions but because he didn't want to be sent away he said, I fell. He never said anything else although he could talk fine.

They could not listen. They could not stop. What they did was the death dance. What they did would do them in.

The butterfly owns her now. It covers her and her wounds.

Now listen, life is lovely, but I CAN'T LIVE IT. I can't even explain. I know how silly it sounds … but if you knew how it FELT.

Everyone in me is a bird. I am beating my wings. They wanted to cut you out but they will not. They said you were immeasurably empty bu you are not. They said you were sick unto dying but they were wrong. You are winging like a school girl. You are not torn.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

Personally I'd give ten thousand bucks to be a psychiatrist and not a writer.

A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I am so tired of that old suffering.

For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will be painted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for these many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off your life like trousers, your shoes, your underwear, then take off your flesh, unpick the lock of your bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.

Sleep without pills? impossible. take pills! death? have fantasies of killing myself and thus being the powerful one not the powerless one.

I am not seeing anyone or writing anyone—I'm on my 8th draft of this play and how many more—God knows.

I'm like a jew who ends up in the wrong country. I'm not a part. I'm not a member. I'm frozen.

Someone brought me oranges in my despair but I could not eat a one

I am never sane, you know -

Sometimes I feel like another creature, hardly a woman. I can't be a modern woman. I'm a Victorian teenager–at heart.

It was pretty rocky last month but I didn't want to depress you with my depressions. I lack contentment. No. I lack a mother.

It is without grace. There is no rhythm in this country of dirt.

I, who was never quite sure about being a girl, needed another life, another image to remind me. And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

I have been her kind.

The bitterness and sense of defeat she experienced at her mother's accusation never quite left her. Nor did her need to please her father.