It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

...most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

Fiction, poetry, music...these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.