If you get old fashioned enough, you'll always be in style.

I miss the comfort in being sad.

I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.

I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.

But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God.

If you get old fashioned enough, you'll always be in style.