The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

didn’t know shorthand either. This meant I couldn’t get a good job after college.

Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.

The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

I hate handing over money to people for doing what I could just as easily do myself, it makes me nervous.

It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction – every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.