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When I was learning to creep, my mother set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just thro...more

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How we need that security. 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 n...more

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The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

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I have stitched life into me like a rare organ

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Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly,...more

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My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an as...more

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Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of day, whe...more

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I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

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I couldn't stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not.

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I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to...more

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I don't know how long I kept at it...I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.It didn't seem to be summer any more

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We’ll take up where we left off, Esther’, she had said, with her sweet martyr’s smile. ‘We’ll act as if all this were a bad dream.’ A bad dream. To th...more

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I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, i...more

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Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and...more

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She looked terrible, but very wise.