suicide is the ultimate 'one-up,' as it were, the accusation that brooks no defense, the argument won at last.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of the meaning itself".

And if I fight, then for what?""For nothing easy or sweet, and I told you that last year and the year before that. For your own challenge, for your own mistakes and the punishment for them, for your own definition of love and of sanity - a good strong self with which to begin to live.

The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally.

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.

all children blackmail their parents with their innocence.

The people on the edge of Hell were most afraid of the devil; for those already in hell the devil was only another and no one in particular.