Notes From: Cambridge Notes & Stone Boy w/ Dolphin

I.
"I can take care of myself." Because when i give, i never really give at all. Always some shrewd miser sits back, hugging the last, the most valuable crown jewel. Always safe, nun-tending her statue. Her winged stone statue with nobody's face.
-SP

Life is a tree with many limbs. Choosing this limb, I crawl out for my bunch of apples. I gather unto me my Winesaps, my Coxes, my Bramleys, my Jonathans. Such as i choose. Or do i choose?
-SP

"I've learned it," the small voice lied. But she hadn't learned her lesson, unless it was the lesson of this limbo where no one got hurt because no one took a name to tie the hurt to like a battered can. Nameless i rise. Nameless and undefiled.
-SP

It might have been Larson, or Oswald, or even Atherton standing there, standing in with the pleasant warmth common to horses. Immortal horses, for one replaced another. And so all was well in an eternity of horses.
-SP (on the Sameness of so many pleasant perfect undesired males)

The milk seared her tongue, but she drank it down. And knew that tomorrow the milk would not pass, all of it, out of her system, extricable as a splinter, but that it would stay to become part of herself, inextricable. And then, slowly, upon this thought, all the linked causes and consequences of her words and acts began to gather in her mind, slowly, like slow-running sores. The circle of teethmarks hung out its ring of blooded roses for her to claim.
-SP

Nothing outside hurt enough to equal the inside mark, a Siamese-twin circle of teethmarks, fit emblem of loss. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.
-SP

His bright minted words out of the vast wastage of space: space where, he testified, space where the Miss Minchells, the Hamishes, all the extra Athertons and the unwanted Oswalds of the world went round and round, like rockets, squandering the smoky fuse of their lives in the limbo of unlove. Patching the great gap in the cosmos with four o'clock teas and cumpets and a sticky-sweet paste of lemon curd and marzipan.
-SP

II.
There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear.
-SP

But everybody has the exact same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."
-SP

The others now pass the time, and even so a little away over the boundary, to kisses, and touches, i cry mercy and back away, frozen.
-SP

And then, bitterly, I say: do i love [him]? Or do i use him as an excuse for a noble, lonely, unloving posture, under the perverse label of faith?
-SP (on the morbidly satisfying melodrama of a prolongued broken heart)

They have condemned you for being mad. Just like that. Because the fear is already there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and "suddenly go out" the way the moon would in the Blake poem.
-SP

I am a woman, and there is no loyalty, even between mother and daughter.
-SP

(To be alone is) so much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.
-SP

But there also is the vampire: the old primale hate: that desire to go around castrating the arrogant ones who become such children at the moment of passion.
-SP

The only perfect love i have is for my brother. Because i cannot love him physically, I shall always love him.
-SP

Who will (have this nonsense); bring me again to be a member of that race which throws snowballs at me, sensing perhaps the rot at which they strike?
-SP

...I refused to go on, knowing i could not be big, refusing to be small.
-SP

...And look, with faith and love, not turning sour and cold and bitter, to help others. this is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and to give to others. Generously.
-SP

We must be at a low ebb when we are this far into the black: that everyone else, merely because they are "other" is invulnerable. This is a damn lie.
-SP

The image of identity we must daily fight to impress upon the neutral, or hostile, world collapses inward; we feel crushed.
-SP

What the hell is tragedy? I am.
-SP

I am dead to them, even though i once flowered. That is the latent terror, a symptom: it is suddenly either all or nothing; either you break the surface shell into the whistling void or you don't.
-SP

The same horror came with them which comes when the paraphernalia of existance whooshes away and there is just light and dark, day and night, without all the little physical quirks and warts and knobby knuckles that make the fabric of existence: either they were all to me or nothing. No man is all, so, ipso facto, they were nothing. This should not be so.
-SP (on men and relationships; on being partially in love)

Fear is the worst enemy. And does she fear? Assuming humanity, yes. But, like the Hunter, the bone structure and coloring can take it. And hide it. If there is any.
-SP

The fear that my sensibility is dull, inferior, is probably justified, but i am not stupiud, if i am ignorant in many ways. I will tighten up.
-SP

What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches? I felt shut in, imprisoned, aware that it was fine and shudderingly beautiful, but too gone with pain and aching to respond and become part of it.
-SP

I can't bear to think of this potential for loving and giving growing brown and sere in me.
-SP

What i fear most, i think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world... If i sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of live without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is that kind of madness which is worst.
-SP