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Elisabeth was one of the most brilliant extemporaneous speakers I have ever known. There was a fantastic charisma about her, an ease with organizing experience, a simplicity and emotional contact, a vitality and an avoidance of mere abstraction, that was endlessly fascinating and inspiring. In this part, I want to set down some of her more characteristic sayings, noted as verbatim from life as possible.
After the cancer recurrence, I would every so often write down things The Poet said that struck me as wise or especially characteristic ... in case she died, I wanted to have some of her spontaneous comments preserved. And so it was on 15 August 1997 -about a month after returning from the five-week hospital stay - at about 10:20pm, while watching the movie Ruby In Paradise on the Independent Film Channel, The Poet said: "I always remembered this girl - the vulnerable beach bunny [in the film]. She's one of those lost souls you meet, y'know. They don't know where they're going or where they've been."
"At his best, Jim Morrison's poetic imagery is right up there with the classics - Keats or Shelley." - 13 June 1998 (in the bathtub at home)
"There's nothing wrong with good, healthy lust. We're primates and we can mate at any time. We're the most sexual creatures on the planet, and that, along with our aggression, is why we've survived."
"I have no objection to ambition. Going for the main chance has an honorable history. Just be honest about it."
"We may have been fucked up [in the Seventies], but, by God, we lived!"
"People don't understand the appeal of True Crime [books]. You get to see people at the extremes - their best and their worst. It's a real genre, almost art."
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