The man has a curious inborn conviction of his own superiority which is quite unshakeable. All his life he has bullied and browbeaten those around him by his high-and-mightiness and his atrocious temper. As a boy he terrorized his entire family by his tantrums, when, if thwarted, he would throw himself on the floor and yell till he went blue in the face. It has been much the same ever since. Everyone's terrified of his rages. He has only to start grinding his teeth, and people fall flat before him.

You mustn't be so afraid of life - it's all we've got. Don't let it hurt you so much.

Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.

I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.

Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.

To wait - only to wait - without even the final merciful deprivation of hope.Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.

My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.