July 27. I am in the prime of life, my best years ahead to work in, to write poems & have children, and I am exhausted, a dull, electric burning desiccating my skull, my bloodstream.

July 29. Any idiot can waste the summer getting tan only to lose it.

August 1. A new month.

August 2. The great fault of America - this part of it - is its air of pressure: expectancy of conformity.

August 3. A woman of twenty-five feels the shock of her age simply by saying: if I live as long as I have already lived I shall be fifty.

August 4. The long running crest of the incoming wave travels like molten glass in whose liquid bulk the fragmented colors of sand and sky blur and melt into each other: amber of furrowed sand is glassed by bright blue-green.

August 8. August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born.

August 9. Who to talk to? Who?

August 10. Cry in anger or in sorrow at the lost world, the mistaken ones.

August 12. No every blonde has got brains, you know.

August 17. You've only got so long to live. You're getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it's hot.

August 19. Face it kid, you’ve had a hell of a lot of good breaks. No Elizabeth Taylor, maybe. No child Hemingway, but God, you are growing up.

August 20. Always the dream. Loving two boys in one day differently for different times.

August 21. Wanting a promise, even though it must be broken, that you will remember me. Why? Because I suddenly grow old. And you so young. I want to remember, hold, and cherish for a little. No future in it.

August 22. All the young growing and testing and being once burned and twice shy and not knowing what to do, or where, or when to be how. And then this, the sudden intuitive flash, the sudden knowing when it is right to render up a dream, to speak so, to love so.

August 25. “When an American says: ‘I want to see you sometime’ it means the same as saying: ‘I don’t give a damn if I ever see you again at all.’”

August 27. Writing as therapy?

August 28. I think I am growing more casual - am I?

August 31. Eager always still for the promising future which, even if twenty years are gone, is not the final word, nor the stiffening of old uncreative age.

September 2. A change of scene, of air, of people.