After my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So-Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.

I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

The world's definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor one's family, friends, or lovers - to say nothing of one's children - to live according to the world's definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.

Because I was raised in a Christian culture I never considered myself to be a totally free human being.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.