It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body.

Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.