“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”

It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.

I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery – air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

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.