“I felt wise and cynical as all hell.”

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.

A man’s world is different from a woman’s world and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted and spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.

So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Intoxicated with madness, I’m in love with my sadness.

Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

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

I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life.

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

I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain; and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.

Never get bored or cynical. Yesterday is a thing of the past.