I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there's simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

...morning is the soul's night.

There's a weird kind of paradox that the more expensive the vacation is, the more potentially anxiety-producing it is.

...the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.