When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically. And then suddenly something happens and you stop being yourself; you become what others force you to be. You lose your wisdom and your soul.

I am empty of everything. I am empty of everything but the thin, frail ghosts in my room.

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy--even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery.

I long to be ... Like Other People! The extraordinary, ungetatable, oddly cruel Other People, with their way of wantonly hurting and then accusing you of being thin-skinned, sulky, vindictive or ridiculous.

Human beings are struggling, and so they are egoists. But it's wrong to say that they are wholy cruel - it's a deformed view.

A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That's all any room is.

It's funny, he said, have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?