You said you were having fun.""Well, yes and no, strictly speaking I was in hell. Perhaps I have always been there. One can have fun in hell.

Of course she had read this work many times before, but there were certain parts to which she passionately returned: so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible. As she read tears began to stream down her face.

Please excuse this outpouring which perhaps makes no sense but is the utter darkness of my spirit pouring from me like black blood.

Suppose she never got into art school, suppose she was not a painter after all? Suppose the talents which others had persuaded her she possessed were to abandon her overnight, or turn out to have been unreal all the time? Suppose she had to take a typing course or live with a word processor? I would die, she thought, I would kill myself or make myself die of grief. Already there was one great deep grief in her life.

Nothing will bring me peace except revenge.

I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible.""That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave.""There is one that will drown me.

As for me — there is another partner waiting for me, a teacher whom I knew long ago — his name is solitude. I am glad to be back here among my English friends . . . But I shall come back here to an empty flat and close the door, and I shall lean back against the door, as I recall I used to when I was young, and breathe deeply and feel the deep relief and liberation of coming home to solitude, coming home to myself.

She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.

I run, I run, I am gathered to your heart. But no, she thought, it's not like that. I am alone. I cannot reach anybody.