I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot.

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. . .

Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs om a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I'm not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you're around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill.

You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.

I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

Would that be dangerous, to not look while being looked at?

I see all mythology as one tradition, a way of disseminating knowledge that must come to us in code so that we can live sanely with it, since some forms of knowledge are too dark, or too complex, to be plainly spoken. And so we have these weird (and also sometimes entertaining and surprising and heartening) tales that belong to all of us.